Voltaire joked (or maybe lamented) that history was nothing but “fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.” The old skeptic didn’t live to see the historical novel grow as its own dubious category, but would likely have chuckled at the efforts its practitioners regularly expend to make their work seem, for lack of a better word, plausible.

And he would have been right to. Historical fiction has earned a mildly pejorative adumbration under the heading of “genre fiction” precisely because all but its best examples default to simplistic plotlines and opaque morals, focusing their energy on proving the depth of their research. It’s the appurtenances of the genre, the details, that get in the way—what’s playing on a jukebox (or gramophone, or orchestra); the local patois and slang.

Heyday is the new novel by author, commentator, and NPR personality Kurt Andersen (also an editorial advisor to this magazine). It may be historical (set in the tumultuous year of 1848), but it’s also a novel of ideas, a travelogue, an ambitious Bildungsroman, and a comedy in the classic sense—full of caricature, bathos, and coincidence. And it’s the furthest thing from genre fiction: a stirringly original story, only incidentally bathed in a mise-en-scène of the mid-nineteenth century.

Andersen follows a young English nobleman named Ben Knowles who, restless in Europe’s intellectual confinement and disturbed after accidentally killing a French policeman, comes to bask in the nascent freedom and delightful chaos of America. In the richly drawn underworld of the New York underclass, Ben falls for Polly Lucking, a gold-hearted prostitute/actress who assumes the pseudonyms of Jane Austen heroines; when she flees New York, in search of the same unnamed and elusive thing as Huck Finn or Humbert Humbert, he chases after her, pursued himself by the crazed and vengeful brother of the slain gendarme. Their journey, however, most recalls not those of the American road novel but that of Tocqueville (whom Andersen makes Ben’s distant relation), soaking up the manifest strangeness and theatricality of America in an almost journalistic manner.

The narrative that chases them westward is thick and emotionally heavy, but punctuated with luminous vignettes of the period—Darwin, the second revolution in France, the madness of the American gold rush. As such, Heyday invites comparisons to Doctorow’s Ragtime, though the stylistic differences are substantial: Doctorow’s simple sentences and restrained sardonic weariness subside to Andersen’s playful and witty narrative, as in a marvelous ethnographic description of New York: “There were more newspapers and Jews than in London, about as many theaters and Irish, fewer coffeehouses and Frenchmen.”

Like Doctorow, Andersen has rather obviously done his homework. Of course, as in any such project, there are moments where the background sounds pat or Wikipedian (especially in the scenes featuring actual historical figures), and others where, if plausibility were the yardstick, it might even give pause (Would a typical Manhattan prostitute in the 1840s really have read Pride and Prejudice?). But Andersen asserts his prerogative as a storyteller so strongly that you can’t help but suspend skepticism, and his general feel for the period is unimpeachable. Witness a splendid bit of antique rhetorical questioning: “Do the hot-coal eaters in Paradise Square or the little dogs leaping through flaming wood hoops on the stage of some Bowery free-and-easy compete with Junius Brutus Booth onstage at the Park Theatre?”

But ultimately, Heyday's historical scenery is tertiary to the action and its meticulous characters—there are no digressions into arbitrary textbook profiles, no past-is-prologue lessons for the modern day. (Maybe one: The impish journalist Skaggs is incensed by the “spurious argument that [President] Polk was obliged to attack Mexico before Mexico turned its weapons against the United States.”)

For a novel of such broad scope, Heyday has a remarkable—almost Aristotelian—unity, and gorgeous, robust prose that almost never nods. When it does, it’s precisely because Andersen is over-illuminating those details the genre seems to mandate. The literary and artistic backdrop is particularly dense, but it’s also a prescient reminder of how fluidly the colloquial becomes canonical: In Andersen’s 1848, the popular music is by Strauss, the popular fiction by Dickens and Melville, and the prevailing political sentiments on the Bowery culled directly from Tocqueville himself. Voltaire and Dumas are quoted promiscuously, but with the freshness attendant to new ideas. The métier of comedy is always the familiar, though. And after all, this is Kurt Andersen, the co-founder of Spy, the humor magazine that will, a hundred years hence, probably provide the background for some other novelist’s nostalgia.