It perhaps strikes anyone who has read an ambitious historical novel — and certainly strikes anyone who has had the audacity to try to write one — that the enterprise represents the triumph of hope over experience, a suspension of hard-won, armoring caution, a Peter-Pannish faith in ... well, faith. How daunting it must be to get it right: facts and artifacts, syntax and slang, costumes and customs, fads and prices, conventional wisdoms and bright ideas. And if such a novel were to aspire to be a bulging monster, teeming with extravagantly vivid characters going about their coincidentally intersecting lives with amplified voices, wearing garish clothes, committing melodramatic vices, loving (and hating) with the fervor of characters from a comic opera, then such fiction would seem perfectly ill-suited to a writer and observer known heretofore as the wised-up, sardonic, founding co-editor of the late Spy magazine. As a columnist (for New York magazine) and a radio commentator, Kurt Andersen should react to the emotions described by gee whiz like a fox to a bunny wabbit.  Andersen’s previous novel — “Turn of the Century” (1999) — is, like “Heyday,” lengthy and episodic, but it owes its flensing spirit to the examples of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Way We Live Now,” by Anthony Trollope It keeps a sharp eye focused on hypocrisy, self-interest, preening, sharp practice and overreaching.  “Heyday,” by contrast, cries huzzah for over-the-top ambition. It’s a band-concert of a novel, a parade in honor of overreaching. Set in 1848 — that hugely eventful year in Europe, the pre-Civil War United States, Mexico and the California gold fields — it never quits exclaiming, Gosh! How about that! Who’d a thunk it? It’s a mighty busy and messy story, jumping among the urban settings of Gotham, Paris, London, Chicago and San Francisco; evil is afoot and brutality the quotidian, but “Heyday” is also a sweet book, with a tropism toward redemption and happy endings.  The protagonist, connected to every subordinate character by sometimes flimsy networks of chance, is Benjamin Knowles, younger son of a newly rich Lancashire mill owner and entrepreneur. During his visit to a friend in Paris during the 1848 uprising that brought down the July Monarchy, the friend is believed to have been killed, and Benjamin is inadvertently an accomplice to the death of a militiaman. A principal weapon used during the mortal mayhem is the beak of a stuffed penguin, which suggests why at least one advance review of “Heyday” has described the novel as a “parody” of Victorian melodrama.  It is in fact an homage to Dickens, Dumas and Hugo, reviving as a central plot device the relentless quest of Inspector Javert, in “Les Miserables,” for the hide of Jean Valjean. Benjamin is hunted throughout “Heyday” by the elder brother of the slain militiaman, Drumont, a Corsican rumored to be the bastard son of Napoleon by his prostitute mother. Prostitution — in New York and San Francisco — provides a wealth of material and moral calculus for Andersen’s characters, the most successful of whom is Polly Lucking, a social-climbing nascent feminist, part-time unsuccessful actress and part-time wildly successful hooker in a New York brothel.  Benjamin, fleeing from Paris to England, and from England sailing to New York to seek adventure and fortune in the New World — looking for a “permanent place to live in a more suitably ... American way. Whatever that meant” — meets Polly (unprofessionally) and falls in love. This brings him together with Polly’s brother, Duff, a survivor of the Mexican War suffering so acutely from post-traumatic stress disorder that he is not only a firefighter but a firebug, not only a sentimental idealist but a murderer. None of this, believe me, is played for laughs, although New York’s 19th-century brutality and coarseness approach comedy in their grotesqueness. (A noteworthy passage regards a fellow firefighter, Fatty Freeborn, a bully and rapist, who eats for dinner the sheep he has loved to death during the cocktail hour. Ameliorating this bestiality are two episodes detailing the attempted rescue of “imperiled pets” — a puppy bobbing downstream in one scene, a kitty trapped in a burning whorehouse in the other.)
Kurt Andersen’s ambitious historical novel looks at America in 1848: what’s astir, what’s been invented, what’s in and what’s out.