We’ve long suspected that Kurt Andersen is a fictional character, or rather, a consortium of writers and raconteurs doing business as Zeitgeist, Inc. How else to explain this purported Kurt Andersen’s cutting-edge sensibilities and sheer ubiquity? Surely no one man could juggle so many chain saws. According to the bio that accompanies Heyday, his latest doorstop of a novel, Andersen was the co-founder of Spy magazine, currently hosts a Peabody Award-winning public radio program (Studio 360), writes a column for New York magazine, and previously did stints as a columnist for both the New Yorker and Time. Somehow he occasionally finds the time to write novels like Heyday, a broad historical tale of “America’s coming of age” in the mid-nineteenth century. Did we mention that said novels are long? They are. Very long.
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