Theories of transmutation

LIKE many readers, I love historical fiction that transports me back to a particular place in the world and immerses me fully and imaginatively in the lives of its inhabitants. I remember finding, when I was very young, a paperback historical romance set in biblical times that began in Egypt, moved to Galilee and ended at Masada; that’s when I realized how vividly fiction can re-create places and lives.

Some critics attribute the resurgence of historical fiction to our reluctance to look forward and our pleasure in looking back -- in shuddering at how much worse life was in Victorian London or medieval France. Some trot out the old trope that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. But certain contemporary historical novels lean too much toward historical gore, focusing on blood, epidemic, squalor and death; or historical porn, with its copious sex, aberrance and bestiality. Often absent are compelling and original characters that engage the reader.

“Heyday,” Kurt Andersen’s new novel, falls into another category: historical lore, with an abundance of plot, well-researched settings and characters that are vivid, worrisome, horrifying, stubborn and convincing. The period details are there, but they are not the book’s sole raison d’etre. Andersen’s previous novel, “Turn of the Century” (2000), was a social satire celebrating the arrival of the millennium; this time, he has turned his panoramic gaze backward -- to New York City, and then to the rest of America, in 1848-50.

The Englishman Benjamin Knowles, second son of a baronet, unwittingly precipitates and then participates in a three-day rebellion in Paris that dethrones the French monarchy and instigates revolutions elsewhere in Europe. He flees Paris for home and then heads to New York, where he meets Timothy Skaggs, a man of many passions -- journalism, astronomy, daguerreotype photography. (“Skaggs twisted the brass focus knob a final jot, forward and back, making the image on the glass a hair sharper. He adored focusing -- it provided him the momentary happy godlike sensation of controlling one small spot in the universe.”) Alone and with Skaggs, Knowles roams the city, their sojourns ending in nights of liquor and long, long conversations about the world. New York is depicted in exuberant detail: docks, sugarhouses, dairies, Prince Street, Five Points, Gramercy Park (slyly referred to as “a reproduction of the city he had fled”).

The beginning of the novel is a bit slow, due to layers of flashback and careful scene-setting, but the lengthy dinner-party exchanges (including an amazing one in England with a flatulent Charles Darwin) reminded me that people once did talk like this, for hours on end, debating world politics, social movements, art, science. “[T]ransmutation happens to be an idea much on my mind,” Darwin says to Knowles, “... water becoming steam ... a girl of the streets gradually turned into a respectable woman.” He also muses on the “transmutation” of barnacles and tapirs; later, Knowles encounters both in America. As for the girl of the streets, Knowles will spend the rest of the novel testing that theory of Darwin’s.

Skaggs introduces Knowles to Polly Lucking, an actress and part-time prostitute in a Mercer Street house, who is smart enough to keep her life strictly compartmentalized (in her assignations, she uses various aliases out of Jane Austen novels) and ambitious enough to save her money. Both she and her brother, Duff Lucking, have been damaged by life -- a hard-luck existence after their father’s ill-timed investments, their toddler siblings killed by “swill milk.” Duff’s form of compartmentalization is vengeful pyromania and an obsession with the Bible. He joins the U.S. Army and is forever changed by the Mexican War. After five days of shelling with “incendiary hot shot,” he witnesses the results: “In a little yard behind a ruined, smoldering tavern they’d found five people curled and sprawled on the ground, broken and burned and bleeding, whimpering and groaning, barely alive.” He deserts and, back in New York, becomes a firefighter, convinced that only fire can cleanse sin. He starts his own blazes, burning down the swill-milk plant and various other places, including the bakery where Fatty Freeborn works. Freeborn is a disgustingly vivid Bowery b’hoy (“they were themselves human slang, and like new words had sprouted mysteriously and suddenly in the less respectable city streets and cellars”), who engages in “blackbirding” -- capturing escaped slaves and returning them to the Aetna and New-York Life insurance companies for the reward.

Knowles thinks Darwin’s theory of transmutation will make Polly a better woman, whereas Polly thinks she’s one already. She has taken Priscilla Christmas, a Five Points girl, under her wing, out of compassion, and persuaded her to work in the brothel. Later, she and Priscilla leave the city to investigate the various utopian communes that have sprung up around the nation. Knowles, Skaggs and Duff follow.

The classic road-trip device keeps everyone moving through what becomes a series of dramatic coincidences. (America was much smaller then, the reader must conclude.) Knowles and his retinue meet up with soap purveyor Procter (of Procter & Gamble), Allan Pinkerton (the original Pinkerton of the detective service) and many other such figures. What keeps it all from seeming farcical is the constant and utterly believable presence of commerce. In every village, commune and city, someone is selling something. America is a huge commercial hive, and the current animating it is love of money.

By the time Polly and her protegee reach Indian country, they have reinvented themselves in true American fashion. “Priscilla had grown to adore the emptiness. It had never occurred to her before that horizon and horizontal were, as she thought of it now, parent and child. These plains, here in their baked, brown heart west of Fort Childs, were the very opposite of New York City.... Even the puddles were different -- instead of the city’s foul bowls ... the puddles here were alkali pools that smelled like strong soap.”

In pursuit, Knowles and his friends travel west to the Mississippi, down that river to the South, through Panama and thence up the Pacific Coast to Gold Rush California, where they create their own socialist community along a creek, extract “gold dandruff” and try to find happiness. Even Duff Lucking takes some small solace in the wilderness, falling in love with the butterflies: “The monarchs, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, resting and waiting on every branch of every pine he could see, the way they had covered the slope of the Mexican volcano.... ‘Hallelujah,’ he cried out loud. With his right hand he felt twigs and needles and pinecones caught in his hair, like a crown of thorns.”

But one of the best things about “Heyday” is Andersen’s refusal to surrender to sentiment. Duff, for example, stays true to his notion that destruction by fire is the sole way to renewal; he carries out his cleansing firestorms again and again. Characters we might respect or love do not survive. And this reader was extremely happy that Darwin’s theory of transmutation did not ruin a particular woman of the streets. Polly Lucking may marry and get to own her own theater, but she will always think of life in terms of what its good things cost.

Toward the novel’s end, a poignant exchange takes place:

“ ‘Perhaps one day, in some future century,’ Skaggs said, taking a long pull on his cigar, ‘all of this -- the gold, the easy fortunes -- will be considered a fairy tale of El Dorado, nothing but make-believe.’

“ ‘And the four of us,’ said Polly, ‘characters in the story?’

“Skaggs smiled. ‘Minor characters.’ ”

But Andersen’s novel is a major historical work, of lore and wisdom, irony and humor -- the kind of historical novel that has always been the most satisfying to read. *