A Parisian in America

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Before getting to the things that Bernard-Henri Lévy does well in American Vertigo, his entertaining and insightful account of how, last year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville — the aristocratic French author renowned for his perceptive and enduring classic, Democracy in America — the U.S. monthly magazine Atlantic commissioned Lévy, who is perhaps the world's most famous living celebrity-intellectual, to retrace the steps of De Tocqueville's 1831-32 ramble through the young republic, a trip that inspired Democracy, let's identify, just for the record, the single most annoying flaw in Lévy's tome: overly long sentences. Still with us? If so, then you will emerge from the author's thicket of anecdotes, aperçus and subordinate clauses to find your mind stimulated and faith in America renewed.

Oh, another problem: Lévy is French. That means a preoccupation with theory, and he duly invokes Althusser, Aristotle, Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Lacan, Montesquieu, Nietzsche, Rousseau and a pantheon of other high domes in his attempt to understand America. Sometimes he tries too hard. A visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, prompts a thesis about that sport as the country's true religion. Americans themselves probably see it as just another drug-riddled branch of the entertainment business. In addition, Lévy's European-ness draws him, like generations of other Old World observers, to all that is grotesque and egregious in the U.S. In his 25,000-km tour Lévy makes sure to visit a gun show in Fort Worth, a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco, the gigantic Mall of America near Minneapolis, the Kennedy assassination site in Dallas, a Nevada brothel and two evangelical megachurches. He even gets into Guantánamo, which — having by now seen several U.S. prisons, as did De Tocqueville — he finds representative of America's vindictive attitude toward incarceration.

Like De Tocqueville, Lévy encounters many of the leading lights of the day: George W. Bush ("a cunning child"), Hillary Clinton (driven by the Monica Lewinsky affair, he implausibly surmises), Barack Obama (impressive in every way), Sharon Stone (angry at Bush), Warren Beatty ("intelligent and precise"), Norman Mailer (at 82, "eyes fixed on eternity"), Samuel Huntington (whose Hispanophobia alarms him) and Woody Allen who, when Lévy gets personal, snaps, "She's not my daughter."

Lévy also gets personal with ordinary Americans, who charm him with their politeness, pragmatism and, on occasion, intelligence. He marvels at the patience of passengers queuing at an airport (the French would be murdering each other to get ahead). And when a stone-faced policeman collars Lévy for urinating alongside a busy highway, a hallowed Gallic custom, they end up in a lively discussion of De Tocqueville — who, Lévy notes, remains underappreciated among the French.

They certainly know Lévy, whose bronzed, leonine visage is familiar from talk shows and gossip columns. "BHL," as he is known at home, exploded onto the literary scene at age 28 with Barbarism with a Human Face, in which he excoriated Marxist intellectuals for complicity in communist horrors. In 30-odd books since then, he has remained provocative and, unusually for a French thinker, pro-American. "I have been coming to the U.S. for 40 years," says Lévy, 57, from an airport lounge in Washington, amid a punishingly long book tour. "My wife [Connecticut-born actress Arielle Dombasle] is Franco-American. I have strong links with the U.S. Yet I discovered on this trip that I did not know anything. Every single step was a surprise, every moment a paradox, every meeting an education. Europeans have a poor understanding of the U.S., not because they don't spend time here, but because of a smog of cliché and prejudice."

Lévy tries to dispel that smog. Despite Americans' reputation for obesity, for instance, "I didn't find any more fat people here than in any French provincial town." And he wishes the U.S. well. The Vertigo in his title refers to the vertiginous identity crisis he sees Americans facing, their need to reconnect their values with the behavior of their government. Where De Tocqueville famously warned against the "tyranny of the majority," Lévy sees a tyrannical right-wing minority acting like a majority. What kind of U.S. would he prefer? "An America of the Enlightenment, of human rights, of democratic dreams and achievements," he says. "This America will definitely overcome its present crisis." And once his book is published in Europe later this year, perhaps this America can teach people there some lessons, like how to behave in queues.