Kurt Andersen

Like lots of actual 19th century novels, most notably Charles Dickens’s, Heyday contains a few coincidences. OK, more than a few.

Dickens’s friend John Forster, a writer and editor himself, put it perfectly: “On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as yesterday.”

Since Carl Jung, we’ve called such meaningful real-life coincidences “synchronicity.” And just as Alfred Hitchcock famously said that movies are real life with the boring bits removed, movies and novels (and for that matter, pretty much all art) can also be real life with the boring bits removed and the extraordinary bits, including coincidence, emphasized.

Which is all a preface to my present book-tour visit to San Francisco. Here in the city where several of my novel’s major characters wind up, I received an email from someone I don’t know — a descendant of Nathaniel Prime, who had borrowed Heyday from her public library. Prime was a Wall Street banker in the first half of the 19th century, one of the richest men in New York. He and one of his sons are characters in my novel. His real-life descendant wrote wondering about my depiction of her great-great-great grandfather — was he truly a “scoundrel”? (Not so far as I know, I told her; in his case, since he is so little known today, I used extreme literary license.)

Most of what she told me about Nathaniel Prime I already knew from my research. What I certainly didn’t know was that he was “one of the most valuable acquaintances of Alexis de Tocqueville and [his partner] Gustave de Beaumont during their travels in the United States” in the 1830s, that he “entertained them in his home in Hell Gate” in present-day Queens, nor that his firm, Prime, Ward and King had “served their banking needs and forwarded their mail all over the country.”

Yet one of Heyday’s main characters, an entirely fictional Brit named Ben Knowles, has a cousin who is married to Tocqueville. And Prime, Ward and King serves as an American banker and mail-forwarder for Ben.

The moral of the story: existence is so thick with coincidence, only a small portion of which we get to glimpse, that even the most coincidence-riddled fiction probably understates its presence in real life.