Year of Destiny

The telegraph. Photography. Railroads. Gas lighting. The 1840s were an age of big inventions. The world was shrinking, the pace of life advancing so rapidly that within the course of a decade or two, human beings left behind a world dominated by their limitations and entered an age when dreams could be made real through the practical application of science. This juggernaut of technology collided head on with a political and cultural world still dominated by monarchs. The clash of old regimes with new technology produced tectonic shifts in culture. As Andersen said during an episode of NPR’s Studio 360 (which he hosts), “To me, the whole era is like the political and cultural tumult of the 1960s combined with the tech boom of the 1990s, times 10.”

Karl Marx published The Manifesto of the Communist Party on Feb. 21, 1848. The next day, Paris erupted in revolution, forcing King Louis Philippe to flee for his life from the mobs. The wave of strife then crashed over the rest of the continent, touching nearly every nation; even Britain, though spared violence, saw huge demonstrations by the working poor. Tens of thousands across Europe died in turmoil that must have seemed apocalyptic.

Andersen begins Heyday during the Paris revolt, a seemingly strange start for what is a very American story. Here Ben Knowles, an Englishman disaffected with his father’s purchased title and industrialist attitude, is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time and, in a surrealistically tragicomic fashion—a stuffed penguin is involved—accidentally starts the riot. He flees back to England, from which he decamps for that ideal of equality and opportunity, America. His father denigrates this destination as “the half-baked nation, where speed trumps all.” By the time Ben arrives in New York, Americans are entranced with the events in Europe, seeing in the rebellions a desire to be like them: free and independent thinkers and experimenters.

The novel portrays mid-19th century New York in such amazing detail that it’s a marvel Andersen required only four years of research. Slums and whorehouse parlors, parks and theaters, stores and fire halls come to life. Populating the re-created city are characters at once so believable and quirky that they seem to sprout organically from the fertile soil of the city’s mixed cultures. Heyday focuses on three of these citizens; Timothy Skaggs, a newspaperman, photographer and cynical social critic; Polly Lucking, a beautiful actress, artist, free-thinker and part-time prostitute; and Duff Lucking, Polly’s brother and a troubled veteran of the just-concluded Mexican War who has an unhealthy fascination with fire. They are all brought together with Ben Knowles and a cast of supporting characters right out of a Mark Twain novel.

Heyday is at heart a love story—both Ben’s love for Polly and Skaggs’ love-hate relationship with his country and city. But the novel is so much more than a love story that its great length never weighs heavily. In the course of its 600-plus pages, there are chases, philosophical discourses, murder, sex and more coincidences than a season of Seinfeld. As Andersen notes in the novel, “Life is all in the timing, and timing is mostly a matter of luck.” Though his use of coincidence to advance the plot may at first seem contrived, it soon becomes obvious Andersen is using the device to emphasize the growing smallness of the world in a new age of steamships and telegraphy. The stunning flukes and bits of chance are just as remarkable to his characters as to the reader.

While traveling from New York through the nation’s midsection—populated not only by farmers but by a surprising number of religious cults, each attempting to create their own utopia—Andersen’s characters learn that America is truly a land of constant reinvention, an ongoing experiment in social and political engineering. It isn’t all pretty. Slavery is an ever-present horror, affecting even the free states, and the seeds of civil war are germinating. Women such as Polly are also beginning to demand more control over their lives, with feminism taking its first tentative steps. And in the gold fields of California (yes, 1848 was also the beginning of the gold rush) they are confronted by an exhilarating mix of greed, freedom and energy unlike anything seen before. Contemplating a San Francisco harbor full to the brim with ships, Skaggs remarks that the resulting racket is “the music of our new American democracy, ugly and beautiful both, unaware that it is either.”