Anglo-American fiction likes to reimagine itself. In 2004, it reimagined Henry James to great effect, culminating in an argument between Henry and William James as imagined by Colm Toibin.

In Mr. Toibin’s “The Master,” philosopher William, dismissing his brother’s novels “about the small business of English manners,” urges him to do something “serious” about his Puritan forebears. Henry replies, “It would all be humbug,” and declares the historical novel to “be tainted by a fatal cheapness.” The most assertive moment in Mr. Toibin’s tale of doubt and subtlety, this was an exchange to raise the blood; it seemed to define the debate about recent historical fictions – even if Mr. Toibin’s novel was on the wrong side of this debate.The point, after all, was that Henry James would not have anticipated a novel about a real author – that historical fiction can evolve like anything else.

Two new books, Roger Rosenblatt’s “Lapham Rising” (Ecco, 243 pages, $23.95) and Chris Bachelder’s “U.S.!” (Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $14.95), go so far as to literally resurrect bygone literature. Mr. Rosenblatt, a television essayist, remembers William Dean Howells in this light but deep satire on the Hamptons, where a descendant of Silas Lapham is raising a monstrous mansion alongside Harry March’s yearround shack. March makes the Howells’ connection and drops it,preferring to dredge up Samuel Johnson against his worldly foe: “Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, / The danger gathers as the treasures rise,” he quotes from the “Vanity of Human Wishes.”

March was once an author; now he becomes an angry old man. “Gaah!” is his regular intonement, and readers imagine him sounding “like a gargle laced with a wheeze,” which is actually how March hears Lapham. March risks becoming like those he hates, as several well-meaning friends warn. In his paranoia, he has forgotten rule no. 2 of Mr. Rosenblatt’s nonfiction book, “Rules for Aging”: “Nobody is thinking about you.”

March is building a vintage catapult, and he spends much of the novel’s day searching after horsehair (it must have “bounce and torque”). Mr. Rosenblatt, meanwhile, has a great deal of fun:

A wind moves across the island like the dismissive or blessing gesture of a hand, and then is gone. One learns to appreciate the wind in later life, after all the sunsets have been oohed to death, and the sunrises greeted with stupendous boredom, and the size of the oceans commented upon ad infinitum …

And late in the novel, after plenty from a real estate agent with a Southern accent:

The urge arrives to gather up everything Southern and dump it on her from an extreme altitude – levees, gumbo, etouffee, catalpa trees, sweating Mississippi courtrooms with redneck juries composed of men named Wayne and slowly revolving ceiling fans, cicadas, hoop skirts, mud, buckshot, whips, bayous, verandas, julips …

Satirical novels risk the crazy maneuvers of real mental life that intimidate more avowedly poetical novels. Mr. Rosenblatt writes levelheaded prose, but he has somatic gall to match; when Silas Lapham and Samuel Johnson cameo, they only underline the already brazen epistemology of man who knows he is kidding himself.

This is Mr. Rosenblatt’s first novel. I hope it’s not his last.

***

Chris Bachelder’s eccentric novel “U.S.!” sees the acronymically eponymous Upton Sinclair exhumed and reanimated. “Are we Socialist yet?” he asks, once he comes to his senses. This is not his first resurrection; he knows the drill. Sinclair doesn’t believe it when he hears that Reagan has been elected:

“It is true,” Tony said. “He’s not joking around.”
“Well, I suppose it’s fitting,”Upton said, “that we turn to Hollywood.”

Mr. Bachelder’s choice of Sinclair is cute, but it also makes sense: The historical Sinclair took his cause seriously to a degree that allows him to operate as a miracle, without stopping to moil in the metaphysics.

“U.S.!” begins with pastiche. Some long narrative fragments give way to telephone transcripts, a syllabus, lyrics, eBay notices, journal entries, and an interview with E.L. Doctorow. Mr. Doctorow has been robbing the wax museum for years, resurrecting historical personalities for books like “Ragtime” or, more recently, “The March.” But Mr. Bachelder takes literary resurrection to a new level, yanking Sinclair so violently out of context.

Mr. Bachelder is attuned to reader reception theory – that is,he describes the weirding of Sinclair at his own hands. Like Nathan Zuckerman thinking about Howard Fast in “I Married a Communist,” Sinclair’s audiences begin to doubt their more abstract political convictions, after considering for too long the personality of the relevant author. “We are stirred and embarrassed,” one union man notes.

The novel eventually gathers itself for a final 100-page narrative, bringing everyone together for a political pageant that has the plot convenience and some of the pathos of the pageant that ends Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” Like Mr. Altman, Mr. Bachelder does not seem satirical: He seems strangely sad. Following Mr. Bachelder’s first novel, “Bear v. Shark,” “U.S.!” confirms a career that may eventually hit a bull’s eye, wherever that bull’s eye might lie.

blytal@nysun.com