Sheila Kohler might have liked, as one of her semi-autobiographical fictional heroines says, to write lyrically about apartheid South Africa in the manner of Alan Paton, but her vision is dark and disturbing. Her novels and short stories of her native land take place in bare dusty towns in baking hot corners of the country, in large lonely houses where tipsy women draw the shades and lie down after lunch, in obscure boarding schools where the teaching staff all seem to have fled Europe under a cloud. The characters are observed from a distance; their lives seem tense, strained, shrouded by silence, and threatened by madness and violence.

Ms. Kohler’s new novel, her sixth, is an effort to lighten her vision a little, as suggested by its title. “Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness” (Other Press, 440 pages, $24.95) is a heavily fictionalized account of the extraordinary life of Henriette Lucy Dillon, who lived in France and America at the time of the French Revolution. Lucy’s father was a swashbuckling Irish brigadier. Her mother, lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, was a French aristocrat descended from the Jacobites who fled England after their defeat in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Lucy passes her childhood under the roof of her disagreeable grandmother, mingles at the court of Versailles, and at age 17 marries Frédéric, Séraphin de Gouvernet, de la Tour du Pin, a brave, honorable aristocrat and military man. Contrary to the mores of their set, the two are genuinely in love. Marked for the guillotine once the Terror begins, they with their two small children undertake an arduous sea journey to America, where they embark on a life of hard work and rugged simplicity, light years away from the stratified world of the ancien régime. This is the young, free-breathing United States of America, when Washington was president and Alexander Hamilton was setting up the banking system that would reward energy and enterprise. Lucy thrives in the new land, relishing the manual labor and real rewards of running a profitable dairy farm, while finding time to befriend some of the leading families of upstate New York.

Having a wider canvas and a more spirited heroine enables Ms. Kohler to escape the stifling atmosphere of much of her earlier work. The novel is not without charm and contains a few memorable moments, as when certain key events of the Revolution unfold before the eyes of the characters, or when Lucy has recourse to faith to recover from the death of her little daughter. But overall the book does not really come alive. The third-person narration is too often flat and toneless, without the stresses and phrasings that would make it sing. Moving dutifully from episode to episode, it sometimes manages to make Lucy’s remarkable history a little tedious.

In addition, while the author spends much time on period detail and description, she barely explores the larger questions her story raises. Lucy wonders at one point how America pulled off a revolution without the Terror that devastated France. Is it only because America is new, as Frédéric suggests, lacking the embedded divisions of Europe? Frédéric himself fought for American independence, but finds himself longing for the old ways and appalled at the capitalist ethos of the country he helped bring to birth.

The closest he comes to reflecting on the events in France is when he “curs[es] the foolishness of his fellow countrymen, his own foolishness, his idle days in the salons of Paris, the idle conversations about the English system, the idle projects for aristocratic reforms. He, too, had wanted necessary reforms without realizing what they would bring in their wake.” But neither he nor Lucy goes much further in examining what went wrong, why the English system offered no answers for the French, if reform might have been possible without unleashing the mob and the Terror.

Still, their story is worth telling and knowing about. It focuses our attention on issues of freedom and self-government that are apropos today, and it hints at reasons for the deep-rooted differences between America and Europe that we still face.

Ms. Iannone is editor at large for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars, and she has written on literature and culture for a variety of publications.