
{"id":95,"date":"2007-04-05T06:54:43","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T14:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/04\/05\/anderson%e2%80%99s-gallivant-across-america\/"},"modified":"2007-04-05T06:54:43","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T14:54:43","slug":"anderson%e2%80%99s-gallivant-across-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/04\/05\/anderson%e2%80%99s-gallivant-across-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Anderson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gallivant across America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>By By Erica Eisdorfer<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Maybe I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m paranoid, but I think there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tendency for some readers to dismiss the whole genre of the historical novel. My paranoia may sprout from an experience I had about 20 years ago in Sweden. I was reading Kristen Lavransdatter, the saga-ized life of a 14th-century Norwegian girl, by Sigrid Undset. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a cool Swedish guy said to me, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153why are you reading that? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s for old ladies!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I was too abashed to point out that the author had won the Nobel Prize, pretty much for that book alone. But maybe that was his point.<\/p>\n<p>Was he intimating that having won a major literary award all but proved the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stodginess? No, he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t thinking that hard about it. Instead, he knew that the book took place in the great Past and thus wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t part of his experience, and was thus irrelevant.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>While I admit that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost hard to find a bodice-buster that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not set in merrie old England, it irritates the heck out of me when an otherwise good reader\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind closes to the possibilities presented by what came before. Do not, you snooty reader, do not, for example, miss Heyday, Kurt Andersen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exuberant gallivant across the United States of the 1840s. And if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new that you crave, well, here it all is, and fast.<\/p>\n<p>Telegraphs are new and fast, as are trains, and photography. The Gold Rush took place over a couple of weeks. The pony express came \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and then it went. Immigrants pour off the ships and are taken into New York\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grand embrace as quickly as you could learn to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hello\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in English. This book is such a breathless ride that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll feel the wind in your hair the whole time you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re reading it.<\/p>\n<p>Ben Knowles is young, British, rich and in love with words like Monongahela and Mississippi. He heads west. In New York, he falls in with Timothy Skaggs, daguerrist, and Duff Lucking, pyromaniac, and in love with Polly Lucking, actress. As the book unfolds, so does the young country: the Mexican-American war, the Mormons\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 search for a home of their own, the nighttime machinations of the Underground Railroad, new astronomical inventions. Also, celebrities: young Whitman, ambitious Lincoln, scatological Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u201deven the last living Great Auk makes its own appearance in this novel.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that things change and the faster they change, the faster they change.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to keep up. Sometimes the changes are welcome. Any way you look at it, it pushes your mind outside of its box.\u00c2\u00a0 Polly, the only lady in San Francisco, figures on her fingers what she could make if she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d turn just a trick or two per day. Ben lectures on French socialism and rebels against his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s business: the sale of guano and sometimes, slaves. Timothy Skaggs dreams of photographing the rings of Venus. Duff tattoos his skin to hide a secret and falls in with the Indians. Could those characters have had that courage, those ideas, taken those risks without the push of the tide of the new nation as it grew west? But did it happen too fast?<\/p>\n<p>For some of them, it did. The speed of change blew the Indians right off the map. And slaveholders. Wealthy Southerners could sit on their verandas and feel that change a\u00e2\u20ac\u2122coming. For others, the speed of progress was just right. When you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re starving in Ireland, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no time like the present to emigrate to the new world. Or to be liberated from slavery. Or find a chunk of gold the size of a baseball.<\/p>\n<p>Andersen writes as if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leaving out every other line, the perfect style for a book paced at the speed of light. Heyday is a little like Toni Morrison\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Love in its constant references to events that haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t yet occurred but are about to. Indeed, that the author was able to imbue his novel with such a pace and yet knead all that detail into the body of the work seems like a real feat. Heyday is a compulsive read, and because of that irritating editing errors (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153dragon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blood\u00e2\u20ac\u009d referred to twice within as many pages, for example) diminish in importance.<\/p>\n<p>Heyday, a big, brave, bold novel, is about change: exciting, exhausting, confusing and, certainly, inevitable. It casts us back to when we Americans were new and fresh and proud of what seemed then like real accomplishments.<\/p>\n<p><em>Erica Eisdorfer has managed the Bull\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Head Bookshop on UNC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s campus for almost 20 years. She has written for Travel &amp; Leisure and edited Carolina: Photographs from the First State University, published by the UNC Press. She reviewed books for WUNC radio for seven years. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By By Erica Eisdorfer Maybe I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m paranoid, but I think there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tendency for some readers to dismiss the whole genre of the historical novel. My paranoia may sprout from an experience I had about 20 years ago in Sweden. I was reading Kristen Lavransdatter, the saga-ized life of a 14th-century Norwegian girl, by Sigrid&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}