American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Me, Me, and Him

Bernard-Henri Levy is the model of a modern French intellectual. He made his name in the 1970s by showing a nation of philosophers how trendy and relevant philosophy could be. His boldness (he almost single-handedly broke the stranglehold of Marxism on French thought), talent for self-promotion, and zest for globetrotting made him famous around the world. These qualities are in evidence in his latest political travelogue, American Vertigo.

Although it goes down a familiar path -- trodden by many French writers since Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America -- the book is topical. It comes at a time when distrust of the United States among the French is acute, even by their standards. Levy's countrymen routinely regard the "hyperpower" as a dangerous dystopia; according to a recent survey, 85 per cent disapprove of Washington's international policies, compared with 72 per cent of all Europeans. That a French opinion-maker should undertake to trek through George Bush's America and explain what makes it tick must be welcomed.

Unfortunately, the effort falls flat. While Tocqueville, Levy's illustrious predecessor, opened eyes on both sides of the Atlantic, his own musings will enlighten neither. To be fair, Levy is not best served by his translator. Many French words are rendered directly into English, distorting or obscuring their meanings ("to suppress" is used for "to remove"; "urbanism" for "city planning"). Some phrases are incomprehensible without referring to the original they glaringly point to ("as long as we're there" for "while we're at it"; "not without malice" for "half jokingly"). For the most part, the literal translations make Levy's prose awkward rather than cryptic. The book is full of Gallicisms like "It's a little strange, this obsession with the flag". What are mere literary affectations in French -- such as the phrasing of statements as negative questions -- sound plain silly in English ("Isn't (the Hearst Castle in California), after all, the model for Citizen Kane's Xanadu, the fortress of solitude where Orson Welles brought to life and circumscribed his character?", Levy asks. Well, yes: it is that very fortress of solitude).

The convoluted style of American Vertigo, however, cannot be blamed on the translator alone. In many instances, the English version faithfully reflects the bombast of the original. Levy never uses one word when ten will do, and repeats them: "If I had to choose an American city to live in -- if I had to pick a place, and only one, where I had the feeling in America of rediscovering my own bearings -- it would be Seattle". Instead of giving a feel for a place or an institution through subtle details, Levy numbs his readers with hyperbole. Buffalo's derelict centre reminds him of a city hit by "an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano", and Detroit of "a bombed metropolis". The sight of shoppers at the gigantic Mall of America near Minneapolis strikes fear in him: "We are gripped by an obscure terror, as though we had suddenly discovered another face of Big Brother". The rise of home schooling is compared to "the retreat to the deserts" of Syriac Christians in the first century.

Taking Tocqueville as a model, Levy is keen to report on the US penal system, and inspects a number of prisons, including Guantanamo. But he is most scathing about a privately run facility in Nevada: he acknowledges that conditions are better there than in other jails, but the profit motive in looking after prisoners seems to him "the height of dereliction" and a "decisive step on the path to civilised barbarism". You might be willing to overlook such turgid language if there were substance behind it. In fact, Levy tells us very little. Does our knowledge about the Kennedys improve when we are told that they "are the brothers in fate of Oedipus, Achilles, Theseus, Narcissus, Prometheus", as well as "the tragic lining (sic) of a nation who thought it could do without tragedy"? Levy's discussions with eminent Americans are equally short on content. Since none of his interviewees is quoted as saying anything remotely interesting, the meetings appear to be mere exercises in name-dropping: Me and Woody Allen, Me and James Ellroy, Me and Sharon Stone, Me and John Kerry, Me and Norman Mailer, etc.

Levy can show Borat-like rudeness in his desire to sound off at the expense of his hosts. When he meets Hillary Rodham Clinton, he does not just see a politician of presidential calibre, but above all a betrayed woman. Her ambition to reach the Oval Office, he suggests, may be rooted in a wish to cleanse the place of her humiliation: "Will she go there to avenge herself or to avenge him? To occupy the terrain, signal her victory, display, both to the world and to him, what an unstained Clinton presidency can be like?". But like his fictitious Kazakh counterpart, Levy has one great redeeming quality: he does not mean to give offence. Throughout the book, he says what few people in France dare to admit: there is much in the US to cherish and admire. Even the country's religiosity and patriotism, which irk so many Europeans, are described by Levy as signs of a vibrant democracy. America is "one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything, you can still breathe free", he states in a flash of lucid writing.

In the final section -- by far the most readable -- Levy switches from travelogue to essay mode, and seeks to dispel common misconceptions about the US and its role in the world. His assessment of American thinking on international issues is fair: he criticizes the rival doctrines of Francis Fukuyama (liberal democracy as the "end of history") and Samuel Huntington (humanity split into antagonistic "civilizations"), while eschewing the gross simplifications both have been subjected to. His treatment of neoconservatives -- whose views he does not share -- is equally nuanced. Levy condemns their hubris over Iraq, but notes that far from being cold-hearted warmongers, neocons are idealists in the Wilsonian mould. (Curiously, he identifies Huntington as their inspiration -- but neoconservatives argue that democracy can flourish in the Muslim world, and thus that there is no "clash of civilizations".) Levy mounts a considered defence of the American school of thought that is closest to his own brand of liberalism: the anti totalitarian Left. He praises such writers as Michael Walzer and Paul Berman -- the former for his analysis of the internal logic of jihadism and the latter for coming up with the concept of "Islamo-fascism". His defence is useful, as neither is well known in France -- which is particularly regrettable in the case of Berman, an outstanding student of French intellectual life.

The final chapter, entitled "Has America Gone Mad?", gives an emphatic "no" answer to the question. The US, Bernard-Henri Levy argues, is not the imperialistic monster critics decry. But he relapses into the overblown prose that mars so much of this flawed book. The concluding paragraph is worth quoting at some length:

"Of this eyeless and originless panopticon that no longer offers the name of a suspect, the head of a guilty man, or the map of the Bastille on a silver platter every morning, now that it is no longer the "master" -- a notion that is pure signifier, about which Lacan would say...that it is the other name if not for the world then at least for all that, in this world, works towards enslavement of men -- America not the demiurge; it is no longer, if it ever was, the mastermind; you can no longer say either that it is the malignant nucleus of empire or that it is the empire of evil."

With defenders like these, Americans may wonder, who needs critics?

Henri Astier works for the BBC World Service.

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