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American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville

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That probably the best book on America was written by a remarkable Frenchman has been known since about 1830, but that fact doesn't seem to bother Americans one whit. On the contrary, we're glad to have it. Especially these days, when the question of American character and integrity seem to be on the chopping block, both here and abroad. But it does seem to irritate the French a good deal, because even though they can lay claim to having authored the best book on America (although one certainly can't forget Mark Twain in this context), they still don't seem to understand it. Alexis de Tocqueville's `Democracy in America' set the bar very high for French intellectuals, and it's become something of a great-great-grandfather complex for them. Tocqueville threw down the gauntlet, and Bernard-Henri Lévy has picked it up in his `American Vertigo.'

Whatever else they disagree on, French intellectuals - of which Bernard-Henri Lévy is certainly one (his initials BHL are often compared in France to a fashion brand, and he prefers shirts that can't be buttoned to turtleneck sweaters) - seem nevertheless destined to share one thing in common: at some or other point in their careers they are compelled to try and 'understand' America. This is the pretext for Lévy's new book, a fast-paced jog through the US that aims to sample the patchwork that makes up the fauna (the political animals, Amish people, strippers, etc.) and the flora (usually restricted to natural wonders like the Space Needle, megachurches and certain well-known prisons) of our American culture, or American Vertigo. Lévy travels to America precisely because he doesn't understand it. America inspires vertigo, and so the title of Lévy's book is already given before he voyages to the New Continent, like a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville who Lévy says explicitly underwrites his entire book, and so invites comparison on a few points. Lévy is decidedly not Tocqueville, of course, who had astute political and cultural things to say regarding the character of early America. Instead, BHL's insights are journalistically profound, or what amounts here to the same thing, profoundly journalistic.

The cultural myopia that Lévy starts out with does not improve during his travels, as is evident on any page of the book, and instead of rejecting it Lévy embraces this myopia as the guiding principle of his voyage, as it allows him the liberty of seeing America differently. This inevitably produces some interesting juxtapositions, but what it does not do - and moreover, it's not meant to - is provide any clarity. Throughout the book, Lévy flits from one venue to the next, with nothing more than something 'interesting' to say - in the way that we say, 'hmm, that's interesting,' and then promptly drop the idea because it really doesn't lead anywhere. Now, this is not a critique of the book per se: Lévy is not aiming for anything more from his thoughts than the production of an interesting read. He doesn't intend to understand America, and that is precisely what his book is about. As the title suggests, it still gives him vertigo. In this sense Lévy sets out in the opposite direction from Tocqueville's `Democracy in America.'

American Vertigo instead intends to be provocative, even if that means simply placing any two things that are American side by side (say, Arlington Cemetery and baseball) and observing: 'isn't that interesting! I wonder if this isn't somehow a key to grasping America?' Unfortunately for us, but more so for the French public who won't know any better in their edition of the book, the fact that Lévy has selected himself as the major guide and muse for his trip to America ultimately leaves the reader none the wiser for having read it. Lévy's no Virgil. But then perhaps that's because Virgil wasn't flashy. He has questions, but he intentionally sets out to raise them, not to answer them. Never mind that Lévy doesn't quite understand what causes the acute American vertigo that he suffers from: he's interested at the moment in the attraction (or distraction) that America affords him with.

Nonetheless, when it comes to America, Lévy likes what he sees, and his anti America-bashing stance has won him friends here in America. This book doesn't bash America, and that does set it apart from most other books written by French intellectuals on the topic of `America' since Tocqueville's praise and his sharp eye for truly defining characteristics of Americans, even if these also included well-perceived faultlines. It's clear that at least one of the reasons why the French are obsessed with 'understanding' America is because Tocqueville kept comparing the French to Americans in his 'Democracy in America.' And as Tocqueville's insights into the characters of both Americans and French are still relevant today, it seems that if one if wanted to read a book that explains America to the French, or America to Americans, Tocqueville's is by far the first and best guide. One thing that Tocqueville decidedly did not suffer from is vertigo. For all of Lévy's gushing about how wonderful a place America is, one gets the sense by the end of the book that for Lévy, it's a nice place to visit but that he wouldn't want to live here.

After reading Garrison Keillor's review of this book in the NYT I feel compelled to weigh in my opinion of American Vertigo, by Bernard-Henri Levy. Keillor's review, for those of you who have read it and are consequently skeptical about shelling out the money for this book, was one long shamelessly insulting piece of invective, totally unfair, totally off the mark and illustrating a complete lack of understanding and forebearance. Because Levy was at times (admittedly, quite often) long-winded, philosophically minded, and revelled, it's true, in frequent references (sometimes obscure) to novelists, philosophers, movie directors, to support his theses, Keillor trampled all over this book without digging any deeper. He accused Levy of being superficial, harping on his writing style, and hypocritically wrote an embarassingly superficial review of this admirable book.

What can you expect from this book? Don't go in hoping for all of the answers. No one person, American or not, understands all of the nuances of this broad and diverse country (Whitman of the US: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes"). But I consider this perspective from an outsider commenting on our culture, a la Tocqueville, to be an invaluable insightful piece of journalistic writing. He sets out on a cross-country ramble, with the opinions and misconceptions of his countrymen surely ringing in his ears, and reports with admirable honesty having been shocked by how many of his preconceived notions were utterly shattered. True he is still set, and couldn't possibly budge (what would be the use to us?) from his French-ness. And so his itinerary is surely not one an American would choose in pursuit of cultural enlightenment. He visits seven prisons (hence, in the footsteps of Tocqueville) including Guantanamo Bay, the Mall of America, Cooperstown, the Space Needle, a brothel outside of Las Vegas, a strip-club within it, a gun show, and many other diverse instances of Americana. He interviews a wide swath of people of myriad colors and stripes. The result is a pastiche of observations and reflections, sometimes frustrating, often insightful, poignant, even poetic. For someone who grew up in the Southwest, it was marvelous to read his deconstruction of the sprawling, decentralized cities there, and once again his fresh, outsider's perspective was naive, engaging, insightful, incomplete, but absolutely worthwhile.

It's a shame that so many reviewers on this site gave the book such a crummy rating. Did they read a couple of passages and fling the book into the waste bin after feeling embarassed that this French author was far more cognizant of contemporary and 20th century American literature and politics? Maybe they were encouraged by Keillor's self-indulgent tirade. In any case, I recommend this book to anyone who is willing to sit down, concentrate, and resolve to stick it out to the end.

In his review of this book in `NYT Book Review' Garrison Keillor does an old- fashioned hatchet job. He adopts an attitude towards it, and writes one long put- down. Reading the review, and having read many reviews of books in my time, I knew it was unfair without reading one page of the book. Now I have read the book, and I believe the review is unfair, but does hit on a certain truth. In some way Bernard Henri- Levy just does not `get America'. He wasn't born and raised in America, he doesn't really have the feeling or spirit of it. It's not in his writing, not in the tone of what he says. One major example of this for me was in the way he wrote about ` the myth ` of Cooperstown, the way he goes through some strange intellectual exercise to indicate that Abner Doubleday did not invent the game. And he makes this seem as if it is of tremendous importance to most fans. The man does not know what baseball is. His description of Cooperstown, and even of the `Farmer's Museum' there is off. He doesn't have the feel, or the spirit of it, doesn't understand the innocence and dreams connected with it, its special lore, has no sense of the real feel of what a ballfield is, or probably even what a game of `pitch' and `catch' is.
But that said Bernard Henri- Levy does provide in his very heavily researched and studied travel through America a certain kind of European -intellectual's insight and perspective. He does this, commissioned by Atlantic Magazine to go in the footsteps DeTocqueville who provided the great ur- commentary on American society, who set the standard for all sociologists debate in regards to it today. The assignment of course is unfair, and BHL is simply not in the same league , and could not expected to be . Nor does he in some sense really try to be, and admits in the outset that he is not making a literal and direct parallel commentary to his great predecessor countryman's excursion.

Instead he makes a journalistic journey of his own one rich in observations but also perhaps over-rich in philosophical reflection. In the course of this, he truly does his work, travels it seems coast to coast, visits a number of prisons, speaks with some of America's most foremost intellectuals, William Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, has a five- minute interview with Presidential Candidate Kerry, speaks with politically involved left- wing movie-stars, Sharon Stone and Warren Beatty, visits a whole host of American cities, finding two he loves, Seattle and Savannah , meets with people in bordellos and shopping - malls, in Indian Reservations and model- cities (Sun- City) .And he writes essentially a long series of vignettes of his encounters and experiences, many of which for me were tremendously informative and convincing.

Inhabitants of Sun- City will not love him, but I found his picture of a sterile segregated artificial Paradise a stark warning of where not to turn in Old Age. I too was taken by his rave description of Seattle which serves as one kind of climax for the book. He writes, "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 lost bearings -it would be Seattle. But all in all .. If I had to choose one moment in this discovery.....it would be the moment when arriving from Spokane on Highway 90.. I saw floating like a torch between two motionless clouds, in a dark pink sky entirely new to me, the tip of the skyscraper, already lit up, which in my imagination suddenly condensed everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel Ever since I was little I've so loved saying "gratte-ciels" - "skyscrapers."

But this passage, however strong, also reveals the weakness of the work. For he speaks of America from the point- of-view and with the baggage of the over- verbal French intellectual. He analyzes and analyzes from the point- of- view questions Americans do not ask about themselves. I found this true even in his writing about two American writers, Hemingway and Fitzgerald who have meant something to him. He asks questions about the kind of medical treatment Hemingway received, and about Fitzgerald's situation when visiting Zelda. He does not touch their literary visions, nor does he for them matter touch upon the great Tradition of American Literature.

He does however provide a meditation on America and its meaning today. In this he presents a long and complex debate with major figures of intellectual history. In one small passage of this debate I found when he is discussing the jihad terrorist war against the West a real sense of understanding America. "I'm thinking of those jihadists about whom you can't say enough times that they aim to destroy what is best about the United States: freedom of speech and thought, equality, women's rights,democracy) -this basic yet decisive detail remains then: in the sheer fact of being American, or at least expressing yourself like one and wanting to be one, there is gentleness, a lightness, an element of freedom and, in a word, of civilization , that
makes this country one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything you can still breathe freely today."
This book has far far more in it than I have indicated in this review, and I believe each and every reader can learn much about America from reading it.

Take a one way ticket with Bernard Henri Levy and his text, "American Vertigo" and make the most astonishing journey you ever thought you would do. This book just makes you plunge into the deepest part of yourself - as an American, as a person, as a citizen, as a human being... Though sometimes I feel reluctant to follow Mr Levy in his "clichés" (what about our image of the infamous baguette and French arrogance???), what a wonderful delight to leap into his steps and discover (or rediscover) the marvellous landscapes we share as a nation and to become aware, just for a while, of our differences - the ones we forget or ignore in our everyday lives...

I'm a New Yorker - not black, nor poor... I could be Chinese or Jewish, a politician or a gay, I could live in Savannah or across the Mexican border... I could dream of a better future or I could guard myself from the others, with guns, alcohol, money, priests... Whatever, I'm an American ; I'm part of this endless puzzle, I was developed under this wonderful rainbow where all the colours are obliged to mix...I suddenly realize that I'm proud of me, whoever I am ... This is the fabulous program of Mr Levy's trip (sorry, `book) ; you travel alongside Sharon Stone, Jim Harrison, James Ellroy, Hillary, John, George...you take a walk on the wild side before returning to the light of ideas and debates ... You meet grey people, bizarre characters, charismatic tycoons, even normal employees ... but in the end, when you reach the final stop, after the winding bends and detours, you're in the place where Bernard Henri Levy wanted you to be, provided you've read between the lines, that is!

This landing place is called: Freedom and Democracy.

Believe me when I tell you the journey is worth every second of the ride. I would do it again just for the feeling of reaching the final stop. Take a ticket for this quick trip, open your mind, but prepare yourself for a shock - the other passengers aren't exactly like you... But this is all a part of the adventure and maybe the most exciting thing in the book ! Differences....Thank you Mr Levy to remind us that our differences and weaknesses are also our forces, that we will always have this foolish willingness to make it better everyday, even if we fail sometimes! This was your final conclusion, wasn't it ? Whatever your detractors may think...

Had seen the author on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS and then read a review of the book by Garrison Keillor January 29, 2006 in the New York Times, and loving Keillor on The Prairie Home Companion and having read his books I was intrigued so I bought AMERICAN VERTIGO Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. By Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Thing is I became even more perplexed. Between wondering why Charlie Rose was even mentioned, much less so much, in the book to wondering if Garrison Keillor had read the same book I was reading.

Yes, I like the book. Not because its about anything in America I know, but because of the elements of America I either didn't know about or didn't care that much about. Putting myself in the authors shoes I tried to visualize how he chose the places and people he was writing about. In fact I wish he would have shared more about how he did choose to visit certain places and talk to certain people. Like why Sharon Stone?

The fact that he is a self proclaimed atheist Frenchman who is of Jewish background helped me sort things out. Simply because I tend to travel alot and seek out people and places different from myself and my comfort zones.

So I at back as if in the car traveling with the author from one state to another. Trying hard to see the faces and sites he was seeing and taking in the smells, heat. cold, terrain he was observing. It helped alot too. The book really makes 'melting pot' real. Unlike France and many other countries that aren't as diverse as the United States of America, the book actually shows a much more 'live and let live' attitude which I found refreshing.

The Reflections chapter toward the end really is good. I especially loved how he writes of the obesity situation here in the states and how he hit the nail on the head when he writes about obesity beyond Americas weight situation and how we have an obesity epidemic in most areas of our lives beyond super size meals, to the homes we own, cars we drive, high tech toys we own, clothes we buy, entertainment we partake of. Great food for thought. This chapter alone made the book well worth the price!!

I ordered this book after seeing Levy on the Jon Stewart show.  He was an
entertaining guest.  The book is also entertaining (very), but make no
mistake: this is a serious, thoughtful, surprising, and deeply engaging
meditation on America today.  Levy is both critical of our country (he has
every right to be in my view) but also refreshingly optimistic.  America
remains, for Levy, a great nation and his reflections on this are as
beautiful as anything I've read on the subject.  Levy's book also takes just
about every cliche about America you can name, and which are especially
prevalent in Europe today (that we are pragmatic, not idealistic, that we are
obese, which for Levy is a myth, that we are a nation of rabid religious
fundamentalists, that we are an empire hell-bent on dominating the earth, and
so forth, and shows why they are invariably simplistic when not completely
wrong.  Levy sees danger ahead - what he calls the "democratic messianism" of
Bush, the neocons, and the right wing establishment; the national
embarrassment that was Katrina; a kind of poverty that was as shocking to
Levy as it should be to every American.  And he sees a failure of nerve - and
of ideas - on the left. 
     But on the other hand he also sees America as fundamentally sane - and a
country that is always in the process of renewing itself; still based on and
guided by an American creed unique in the world. This is a book that both
reminds you of what is broken in America, and also reminds you of its
greatness.  For me, what Levy says about America's old and continuing
"grandeur" was relevatory and very moving.
     This book is very beautifully written but it is not for simpletons.  But
for anyone interested, really interested, in where America is as a country
today, you will not find a more interesting or thought-provoking "take" than
AMERICAN VERTIGO.  
     Finally a word about the garrison Keiller review someone mentioned.  I'm
sorry to say it, but that was the most ill-informed, dumbed down, and
practically racist review I've seen in a long time in a major paper (what if
he had said, "The next time a Pole decides to write a book about America,
watch out."  But it's OK to say about a French guy-- who, it turns out --
happens to be Jewish).  Keiller completely misses the point of the book,
along with every idea contained in it.  Keiller makes American book
reviewers, at least, sound like the complete idiots that Levy is convinced
Americans are not. 

For the best review of this one, check the NY Times.

"You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title."

".... 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." MYTimes

As far I can tell, Lévy is a "self-styled" philosopher and a boring writer, except to the French who treat him like a film star. It makes you wonder about the French. I have known some who are fine people; but this man makes me recall the English indictment: "France; a lovely country. Too bad about the people." Too bad their taste in writers isn't as good as their taste in food and fashion!

Many of the criticisms of this book are base on the idea that Bernard-Henri Levy and his French sensibilities spent too much time with the fringes of our society that he should have looked more towards the garden-variety, average American. Those very people he interviewed are your average American and darned interesting especially from the authors' perspective and your's too if you take time to read `American Vertigo' and accept it for what it is. This is clearly not the story of America as told by a tourist board or politician, but I found it rather entertaining.

Having been intrigued by Bernard Henri Levy's account of the assassination of Daniel Pearl, I tumbled for his book about America. Levy is a Frenchman who writes very pro-American (definitely in the minority), who got an assignment from the Atlantic Monthly for a series of stories retracing a European's journey through America...much the same as that of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century.

I finished the book just as I became aware that a grumpy Garrison Keillor had chosen to review the book in the January 29 issue of the New York Times. Just the fact that he did so, is telling. Levy has apparently also appeared with Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart. Apparently Keillor was less than impressed with the nature of Levy's journey and the quality of his prose and his conclusions. I'd have to side with Keillor, although, having not yet read his review (I'll do so AFTER I post this) I think it is fair to say I probably liked the book better than he did.

I found the concept of the "article cum nonfiction book" refreshing, and why not see the country through the eyes of a Frenchman? Levy tells his tale in short sound bites, which is somewhat difficult to follow, but really does have the effect of the continuous stream of differenct images of America, experienced back to back, with little time in between to catch your breath. The problem is not the approach or the concept, the problem is what images Levy chose to be representative of America, and how truly mad we must seem if, in fact, you select the venues he chose. From the highest highs, to the lowest lows, from every mad, over-indulgent "scenic" vista, Levy fails to capture the middle class of the nation.

Let's see, there is his stop at the home of wealthy actress Sharon Stone, his visit to the Mall of America, his visit to Cooperstown, thinking he would find America through the history of her "national pastime" (instead of going to an MLB game....curious). . He visits a total of 7 prisons, including Guantanamo, which many Americans fail to understand or have appropriate access to information about. He lives it up in Las Vegas, he stops in Amish country, he visits a whorehouse, Graceland, the Space Needle, Bourbon St., alternative lifestyles in San Francisco, shopping in Beverly Hills, spends time with some of the country's intellectuals and a lot of well-known people who are all left of center, a wealthy retirement community....you get the picture. In his mad rush to see all and experience all, he actually comes across a few "real people" on his journey, and converses with them.

Naturally, he has a view of America that is skewed to her madness. And while he makes some good points (I liked the "Reflections" chapter) and actually approaches America as an ally instead of something to look down his nose at, Levy ultimately fails.

He's eloquent, but given to hyperbole, he grabs every cliché about America and makes it his own, he's shocked by the extent of our poverty (and should be) and he likes "the pretty places"...Savannah and Seattle (and so do I). I think de Tocqueville would roll over in his grave at the entire, bloated, wasteful trip and the things that Levy misunderstands and makes up. He wanted to find a nation obsessed with the flag, and so he did (even if the vast majority of Americans don't understand the rules for flag handling); he builds castles where none exists (the idea that Abner Doubleday was "the pope of the new religion ...of baseball"; most Americans couldn't tell you who Doubleday was), his sentences run for miles and miles and miles, and it becomes less of a goal and more of a relief when you finally reach the end.

Bernard-Henri Levy missed the real America and drew his conclusions from the "outliers". Not worth a read; difficult to say this after I appreciated so much his suspenseful "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" fiction/nonfiction effort.

"Travelling America in the footsteps of Tocqueville" is the subtitle of this book by fellow Frenchman Bernard-Henry Levy. But Mr. Levy had nothing to do with proposing this trip and little to do with the itnerary of it. Rather, The Atlantic Monthy magazine proposed and set it up for Mr. Levy; although the author does say of the stops proposed that "it was glanced at before leaving." So where did the Atlantic send him to look for America? Mr. Levy's first destination is New York's Rikers Island jail (just the first of 5 prisons he ultimately visits). Next he goes to Cooperstown. Cooperstown is the home of the baseball hall of fame of course, but also the "town of James Fenimore Cooper, and thus of the symbolic responsibility for the slaughter of the Indians," says Mr. Levy. Mr. Levy finds it hard to believe why "every year millions of men and women come, like me, to visit a town devoted entirely to the celebration of a myth." The myth he is referring to is the fact that baseball (as we have since learned) has origins older than Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown. So, presumably it's ridiculous to travel there anymore. Obviously, however, folks go there for the Baseball Hall of Fame, not to pay homage to Mr. Doubleday. Apparently Mr. Levy believes that a celebratory museum of America's pasttime has to be located in the actual place baseball was invented, otherwise Americans are saps for visiting it. (The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is a myth too then and, presumably, not at all worth visiting either, in Mr. Levy's view, presumably.) Likewise, he attacks Gutzon Borglum for proposing to carve Mount Rushmore in Indian territory. Borglum, however, had nothing to do with choosing the sight. And even less justfiable is his criticism that Mount Rushmore is far more grand than the monument for Wounded Knee (also in SW South Dakota), as if everything in America is proposed and commissioned out of Washington D.C. Mount Rushmore was NOT a federal government project. Its size (and the lack of size for the Wounded Knee marker) has nothing to do with decisions made in America's capital. It was a South Dakotan project pure and simple. Conclusion: Mount Rushmore is another huge American myth not worth visiting either. I suppose if Mount Rushmore was carved at Mt Vernon then it be be worthwhile. Such is the reasoning of this Frenchman; who, incidentailly, could have phoned in this book from his homeland as it is full of cliches: Americans "are armed like Nazis" (yes, Mr. Levy uses the term "like Nazis." He also calls America's "obsession with the flag" to be "strange," because, apparenty, it only flies at government buildings in France. Care to know where else Mr. Levy was sent to by the Atlantic Monthy? Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisico, et al. But it is not just places he visits. He also meets with a number of representitives of America culture along the way. Any guesses who the Atlantic Monthy set up for him to meet to take the cultural pulse of America? Answer: Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, and Warren Beatty. This book's jacket describes Mr. Levy as a "brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer" who "has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America." That's the biggest myth, actually, of this book. (06Aug) Cheers!