HEYDAY! HEYDAY!

Kurt Andersen's new novel, Heyday, is 620 pages of exuberance over the birth of modernity in a young America. Like his first novel, Turn of the Century, Heyday is fueled by manic energy, fanatical research, and a wicked sense of humor. The setting is again New York, and the book is encyclopedic in its embrace of the city. The subject is similar, too -- the havoc that technology, money, and a giddy sense of possibility can wreak -- but rather than take aim at the New Yorkers of the not-too-distant future, as in Turn of the Century, Andersen (who co-edited Spy with V.F.'s editor) sets Heyday in 1848, when the inventions of the telegraph, steam engine, railroad, and daguerreotype all conspired to warp time. Andersen's enthralling story begins with the February revolution in Paris and ends with the gold rush in California -- and loosely follows the journey of Englishman Ben Knowles from Europe to New York, where he meets Timothy Skaggs (a journalist, satirist, daguerreotypist, and astronomer), Duff Lucking (a veteran of the Mexican War), and Duff's sister Polly (an actress and prostitute). Ben and Polly fall in love, and the foursome eventually heads west, but what really drives the book is a genuine enthusiasm for progress. Andersen's first novel was a satire of our crazy times, and though Timothy Skaggs, an Andersen-like character, muses on the ironies of his own mad era, Heyday is remarkable for its lack of cynicism. It's a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American.