Francis Spufford’s tale keeps America’s moral conundrums ever in its sights. Illustration by Bill Bragg

The eighteenth-century British novel appeals to an apparently dwindling taste. With intrusive narrators, slatternly plots, odd punctuation, and long, ambling digressions, books like “Tristram Shandy” and “Joseph Andrews” try the patience of many contemporary readers, and modern efforts to emulate them—Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle spring to mind—are frequently greeted with exasperation. Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding couldn’t help writing like that, but what, some people wonder, is Pynchon’s excuse? The appealing qualities of the period’s literature—its humor, its frankness about sex and power, its omnivorous curiosity about humanity and the world—can be squandered, by present-day revivalists, amid defunct slang, semicolon dashes, and promiscuous capitalization.

Francis Spufford’s first novel, “Golden Hill,” which is set in New York in 1746, doesn’t make that mistake. It is trim rather than bulky, refrains from indulging in too many antique spellings, and tells its story with crafty precision. The novel begins with the arrival of Richard Smith, a young man from England, in a city that is still more small town than metropolis. Smith comes bearing a bill of exchange, drawn upon the debt of a local merchant, for the staggering sum of one thousand pounds sterling. (Or “one thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight pounds, fifteen shillings and fourpence, New-York money,” as the newcomer specifies; the baffling complexities of pre-Revolutionary currency and finance become one of the novel’s running jokes.) Smith refuses to state the nature of his business, but agrees to postpone collecting on the bill until the arrival of further documentary confirmation. “You don’t know me,” he concedes, “and suspicion must be your wisest course, when I may be equally a gilded sprig of the bon ton, or a flash cully working the inkhorn lay.” Rumors circulate that the amiable Smith is rich or a charlatan or a Turkish conjurer or—worst of all—a Catholic.

Spufford is the author of five previous books, all nonfiction, on subjects as varied as polar exploration (the splendidly titled “I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination”), his boyhood reading (“The Child That Books Built”), and the mid-twentieth-century optimism of the U.S.S.R. (“Red Plenty”). That last book, although substantially factual, spliced fiction into the mix, and served as a stage in what Spufford has described as his “creeping up gradually on writing novels.” With “Golden Hill,” he arrives at last, bearing the reputation of an author capable of making any topic, however unlikely, at once fascinating and amusing. “Golden Hill” is both. It is also a sort of mocking reversal of the “innocents abroad” motif of such Henry James novels as “Daisy Miller” and “The Portrait of a Lady,” in which fresh-faced, straightforward Yanks are confounded by the perilous subtleties of Europeans. Smith has travelled the world, and he knows intimately the high and low life of his beloved London, a city with a population a hundred times that of New York. His first American encounters, particularly with the merchant’s daughters, Flora and Tabitha, leave him with an overwhelming impression of wholesomeness. The two girls’ faces are miraculously (to his mind) unpitted by smallpox. Even the busiest New York streets don’t stink like the ones back home; they have “no deep patination of filth, no cloacal rainbow for the nose in shades of brown, no staining of the air in sewer dyes.” There are also no beggars underfoot, and everybody is healthy and tall. He is the cosmopolitan; they are the strapping provincials. Surely, whether he is a wealthy man or an adventurer, he must be superior to these rubes in the arts of corruption. “Plain men for the plain daylight, that’s our preference,” a testy American sea captain informs him.

This, of course, turns out to be anything but the truth. A thief steals Smith’s wallet on his first morning, vanishing into a maze of alleyways. The city is split into two factions, led by opposing grandees: Governor George Clinton and Chief Justice James De Lancey. When they’re not grilling Smith to find out if he’s some kind of spy, each man tries to maneuver him to his own side. Smith offends the governor’s secretary. He begins a thorny flirtation with Tabitha, a young lady renowned for her shrewishness and her devious sense of humor. The Guy Fawkes Day bonfire celebration he attends culminates in the burning in effigy not just of Fawkes but of the Pope and Bonnie Prince Charlie to boot. Smith is alarmed by the ferocity of this patriotic display, by the crowd’s wearing “a common mask, of eager, reverent anger.” The conflagration gives Spufford an occasion to offer a nightmare vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “transitory enchanted moment” in “The Great Gatsby,” when Nick Carraway imagines man recognizing North America as “something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” What Smith grasps is “the immense darkness of the continent at whose edge the little city perched—from this one pinpoint of defiant flame, the thousands upon thousands of miles of night unrolling westwards.” Then:

The awe and the fear of the New World broke in upon him. As if, till then, he had been inhabiting a little doll’s house, and misled by its neat veneers had mistaken it for the world, until with a splintering crunch its sides and front were broken off, and it proved to be standing all alone in the forests of the night; inches high, among silent, huge, glimmering trees.

After that, a drunken mob, mistaking Smith for a Papist, nearly kills him. Yet even these terrors do not constitute the city’s true heart of darkness. Smith grimly observes that, while Manhattan’s residents talk incessantly of “liberty and virtue, virtue and liberty,” black men and women are led in shackles through its streets.

Smith dines out, plays cards, and wins over the governor’s secretary (who has a secret of his own). He takes a role in an amateur production of Joseph Addison’s play “Cato,” a tragedy about the Roman orator’s doomed resistance to Julius Caesar’s takeover of the ancient republic. (So deeply did the colonists identify with the drama that George Washington is reputed to have had it performed for his troops at Valley Forge. Golden Hill, not incidentally, is both Tabitha’s neighborhood and the site, in 1770, of the first significant battle between the colonists and British soldiers.) This performance is far from the first time Smith has trod the boards, but nearly every character in the novel is performing in some way. Tabitha says that she detests novels for turning life as she knows it into “smirking sentiment and unlikelihood,” but she loves the grandeur and the pretenses of the theatre, and especially Shakespeare, “because he does not tell me lies about things close to hand.” And, while she and Smith assure each other that they are not Beatrice and Benedick, there’s plenty of “Much Ado About Nothing” in these sparring lovers.