Posted 1/28/2006 02:49:00 PM by Douglas

I saw this guy on The Daily Show this week, and it seemed like even Jon Stewart had a hard time sucking up to his new book, American Vertigo. Apparently, Garrison Keillor didn't find much use for it, either:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea.

But every 10 pages or so, Lévy walks into a wall. About Old Glory, for example. Someone has told him about the rules for proper handling of the flag, and from these (the flag must not be allowed to touch the ground, must be disposed of by burning) he has invented an American flag fetish, a national obsession, a cult of flag worship. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren't a big part of everyday life.

From the five minute interview I saw, it didn't seem to me that Lévy had any real insight about America, and I find the Tocqueville comparison totally overblown. I'm sure he did his homework, and he writes with enough alliteration to make most blue-staters nod in agreement as they renew their subscription to The New York Times Magazine, but it just doesn't sound like he connected with the real America. It sounds like he found the America he was looking for: NASCAR races, Mega-churches, Mt. Rushmore, the dedication of the Clinton Presidential Library, and of course, Sharon Stone.

Keillor fires the closing salvo:

"I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

What he said. It sounds about as deep as a book I'd write about my trip to France. Hey, guess what? They have rude, smelly waiters and like, gosh, a hundred kinds of cheese. Who knew?