“One of the absolutes of bookchat land,” Gore Vidal once wrote — presumably after being stung by some bookchatters — “is that the historical novel is neither history nor novel.” One might reply that that depends on the quality of the writing and the validity of the historical content. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels never rated particularly high with critics as either fiction or history, while Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” won instant acceptance as both, but Mr. Vidal has a point. For a long time, first-rate American historical novels were few and far between.

Perhaps acceptance of the historical novel as literature depends on perspective. British, French, and Russian novelists long ago accepted that historical fact could be blended into a work of the imagination. But then, they’ve been around a lot longer than us; it’s hard to get a bead on history until it becomes history. At any rate, the last four decades or so has probably produced more exceptional historical novels than the previous century and a half.

Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man” (1964) and “The Return of Little Man” (1999), Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” (1974), E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” (1975), Mr. Vidal’s “Lincoln” (1984), and Kevin Baker’s recent chronicle of New York’s secret history, the “City of Fire” trilogy, quickly spring to mind. Many more (including Susan Sontag’s “In America”) might have been marketed as historical novels instead of post-modernist fiction had their authors not been afraid of being told to sit at the children’s table. Kurt Andersen, I suspect, would be happy to have his exhilarating new opus, “Heyday” (Random House, 622 pages, $26.95), called “historical fiction” in neon lights.

Actually, neon hadn’t been invented in 1848, when, in “Heyday,” a young English aristocrat, Benjamin Knowles, is taken by the sight of a lovely young woman who is “illuminated by a pool of gaslight.” All things American are seen by Knowles in a romantic haze. As a boy in England, he dreamed of the American Frontier: “When he practiced shooting his longbow, he no longer imagined himself one of Henry V’s archers at Agincourt but James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, hunting game in some wild, infinite American forest.” Knowles enables us to see the sprawl of antebellum America through a foreigner’s eyes. Through his acquaintance with Duff Lucking (a Mexican war veteran haunted by his compliance in a unjust war and his subsequent desertion) and Duff’s sister Polly (a part time actress and prostitute with whom Knowles falls in love) we get a cutaway view of America’s urban demimondes, particularly New York in the 1840s, a city which “has the air of the permanent carnival about it, as if half its population were on a spree.”

Mr. Andersen, author of “Turn of the Century” and co-founder of Spy magazine, hasn’t exactly done something new with the American historical novel, but he has presented it in a new (gas)light. He unabashedly plays off conventions established by Charles Dickens (Mr. Andersen has a talent for names that Dickens would envy, such as Paragrine “Perry” Christmas, Truman Codwise, and Ninian Bobo) and Victor Hugo (the plot is ignited by a murder in Paris during the 1848 revolution with an avenger who makes Javert seem as ineffectual as Inspector Clousseau). The plot of “Heydey,” with Knowles and Lucking searching for Polly across the American wilderness all the way to Gold Rush California while all are pursued by the Frenchman, is an obvious device to give us a sight-seeing tour of America before the onslaught of modernity. The steam engine and the telegraph in Mr. Andersen’s story are still overwhelmed by the primitive, buffalo-strewn West.

Mr. Andersen has researched his material well enough to be at home with it, and the seams between fiction and nonfiction almost never show. For instance, here’s Knowles experiencing New York’s Canal Street:

Filled with men and women at this hour, lounging, laughing, drinking, and listening to a musical hodgepodge. He tried to pick out the different tunes as he passed — a polka, a Negro song, an imitation of a Negro song, a Hayden divertimento, and some Teutonic dirge, all played simultaneously by five different bands on trumpet, castanets, violins, harmonicas, oboes, tubas, accordions, and drums. Scattered around the gardens he saw two jugglers, a team of three acrobats, and a plate-spinner …

(Any one of the novel’s episodes, including a brief stop at one of the country’s ill-fated mid-19th-century utopian communes, would make a fine novel in itself.)

The westward trek is the engine that propels the story, fueled by the characters’ exuberance at being American and alive during such a fabulous era in history — they are dazzled by the abundance and variety of life they encounter. He offers a vision of the America of 160 years ago, or at least as Americans might have seen it then: an opportunity for freedom and self-realization and for leaving behind the limitations and cynicism of Europe.

Too often in historical fiction characters are stand-ins for the author’s attitude toward the present. We’re seldom allowed to experience things with the wonder that people in their time must have felt. In “Heyday,” as in the very best historical fiction, you feel that the future isn’t predetermined but exists as a series of possibilities — possibilities that include the capacity for good and evil. “The Garden of Eden and Gomorrah merged into a single estate,” observes Duff’s friend, a journalist named Skaggs, while passing through the Isthmus of Panama on the way to California. The judgment could stand for all of the characters’ reaction to the New World. If the idea of Eden and Gomorrah seem contradictory, the America of “Heyday,” like Whitman’s America, is big enough to encompass the contradiction.

Mr. Barra was a finalist for the National Book Critics 2006 Nona Balakian Citation for Exellence in Reviewing 2006.