SOURCE: Wood, James. “The Palpable Past-Intimate.” New Republic 222, no. 13 (27 March 2000): 29-33.

In the following review, Wood contends that in contemporary society the historical novel has become an overworked and tedious genre, but that In America is an exception, characterizing the book as nicely balanced with insight, theatricality, and riveting narration.

Is it still possible to write the historical novel? There would seem to be powerful arguments, and powerful modern instances, against it. First, it is the least innocent of forms in an all-too-knowing age; one might say, paradoxically, that at this late stage it represents the novel at its most complacently alienated from itself. This has primarily to do with the pace of historical change in the last century. It is true that War and Peace is an historical novel, but rather as The Prelude is an historical poem. Tolstoy felt confident about reaching back sixty or so...