The revolution will not be organized: the story of Lafayette reminds us that the United States has always been borderline dysfunctional.

• Author: Heller, Chris
• Position: Book review

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

Riverhead Books, 288 pp.

During the frigid winter of 1777, at Valley Forge, Major General Lafayette wrote a letter to George Washington. The days of the Revolutionary War had rarely been darker or colder. When the Continental Army had reached Valley Forge, eleven days earlier, most soldiers marched barefoot, leaving bloody tracks on the frozen Pennsylvania ground. More than 2,500 would die that winter, from starvation, exposure, or disease. While the soldiers froze, a scandal erupted within the Continental Congress. A secretive cabal schemed to oust Washington as commander in chief of the army.

"I see plainly that America can defend herself if proper measures[s] are taken and now I begin to fear that she could be lost by herself and her own sons," Lafayette wrote. "When I was in Europe I thought that here almost every man was a lover of liberty and would rather die free than live [a] slave.... However at that time I believed that all good Americans were united together, that the confidence of Congress in you was unbounded."

The cabal would be defeated, and Washington would march the army out of Valley Forge, and three long years later Charles Cornwallis would surrender the British army at Yorktown--but as Lafayette's letter illustrates, disunion was as dangerous an enemy as the Redcoats. The United States won its independence, but it was a victory marred by political spats, infighting, tactical errors, and enormous debt. Sarah Vowell's new book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, is an engaging reminder that America has never been anything but a (somewhat) dysfunctional country. This is no rose-colored ode to the Founding Fathers. "In the United States," she writes, "there was no simpler, more agreeable time."

And that's the key to Vowell's understanding of U.S. history. It's a deceptively simple idea that in Vowell's hands feels like something more. Why? Because she's not a historian. She's an essayist, a former contributing editor to National Public Radio's This American Life, who often writes in the first person, adopting the persona of a wry, wise-cracking observer of people. In an aside in Lafayette, Vowell describes herself as a "historian-adjacent, narrative nonfiction wise guy"--a canny, self-deprecating way to absolve herself of an academic's responsibility--who avoids convention as much as possible. It's an effective posture. She writes about history, yes, but she's no...