Kurt Andersen: Heyday

Andersen places these likeable leads in a self-consciously Dickensian world, full of coincidental meetings and sordid streets of shame; there may be too much contrast between Heyday's frothy plot and its detailed, often gamy recreation of the mid-19th century. But the characters and story are really just lenses through which to view history, and as a history book, Heyday is terrific. When Ben or Scaggs walk through New York, Andersen indulges himself with long, flavorful descriptions of dandified thugs, the smell of hot roasted corn, the mania for panoramas, and the sound of revelers reciting the Declaration Of Independence in celebration of July 4.

One of Andersen's major premises is that Americans in 1848 were uniquely aware of their nation's magnificence and the rapid remaking of the world in the wake of the U.S. constitution, just 60 years earlier. Much of Heyday's dialogue consists of people marveling to each other about telegraphy, railway travel, and the rise in enlightened spiritualism. Andersen's heroes meet and chat with the likes of Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman, Steven Foster, Frederick Engels, and Edgar Allen Poe, and Andersen makes them seem like our contemporaries, modern in their thinking and disposition. Heyday is ostensibly about the evolution of culture, and how America transformed from Europe's gangly cousin to its worldly boyhood chum (who never calls any more). But the unspoken question—the one that hangs over Heyday like a morning fog—is, if America is the evolved version of Europe, what distant nation is waiting in the wings to supersede us?