Jill Lepore and her publishers have done a great deal of work to turn this collection of essays into a book. There's something uncanny about reading a book review that's had its present tense shifted to past – as in “Randolph Roth … offered, in American Homicide (2009), a massive investigation of murder” (293) – but because of the kind of review these are, they're worth reading even years after the books themselves have dropped out of sight. If there's anything to the larger claims Lepore makes for The Story of America, it's the way texts that tell stories can become part of other stories. “The study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature,” she writes. “Americans wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print” (15–16).

A little skewed to somewhere in the early nineteenth century, The Story of America nonetheless spans four centuries, beginning with the slippery and self-promoting True Travels of Captain John Smith and ending at Barack Obama's inauguration speech. How presidential candidates are reinvented and repackaged for the race, and have been since Andrew Jackson's friend John Eaton wrote his biography in 1824, is one of the stories she tells on the way. Each is a story about how stories shape identity and experience.

Charles Dickens looms pretty large over the central portion of this book, not only in “Pickwick in America,” which deals explicitly with his visit to the United States in 1842, but in the way that story weaves into others, and the larger one about America. Our dilemma with Dickens is grasping his relation to politics – “fundamentally ‘not interested,’” according to Edmund Wilson, “chiefly interested” according to George Orwell (167, original emphasis). Lepore says there's “an answer” in his American writing. Dickens's cheerfulness was broken by America: by the darkness of slavery, but also by the “pitiful, mean, malicious, creeping, crawling, sneaking party spirit” of American political life (172). It was supposed to be a “republic of dreams” (177), but it turned out a swamp. That's how it happened for Martin Chuzzlewit.

It is the “of America” in Lepore's story that's the most troubling aspect of this book. It is about America, but more than that, it also belongs to America. What Lepore doesn't do is ask, or seem to wonder, about her own imaginative framework. The tales and documents she writes about are precisely what make up her own cultural identity and perspective. In that sense, The Story of America is a very interesting artefact of American exceptionalism. What constitutes this exceptionalism isn't an essence that radiates out – an American genius as writers like Daniel Boorstin once imagined it; rather, it is a set of questions based on an assumption: what is America, and what makes it special?

One of those things, Lepore remarks in the penultimate chapter, “Rap Sheet,” is America's remarkably high murder and incarceration rates compared to Europe: “an American exception, or, looked at another way, an anachronism” (303). An anachronism because history has a direction, and it is away from murder and incarceration? When Lepore mentions slavery – which she does often, including in an essay, “President Tom's Cabin,” about Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings – she often adds a touch of triumphalism, as if she's thinking about that direction. Here is how she ends the book, quoting from President James Garfield's inaugural speech:

“Enough said” (318). But is that really enough said?

In her introduction, Lepore draws some distinctions. History and politics share “a vantage point on the past,” she writes, but “it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence” (5–6). Is The Story of America history? And if it is, then to what kind of evidence is it accountable? Each data point can be traced somewhere, through the layers of stories, and that's evidence. But it is Lepore herself who has arranged those data points and those stories into this story. In a 24 March 2008 New Yorker essay not published in this volume, she wrote that “history is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.” That sounds to me like a good description of politics, too.