In a strange land.(American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville)(Book Review)

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Levy Random House, 320 pp., $24.95)

IN 2004, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly decided to respond to the growing strain in Franco-American relations by inviting the distinguished French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy to tour America and write up his observations for the magazine. Levy was to follow in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, bearing in mind the world-changing book that Tocqueville produced, aged 29, from his study of American democracy. I say "world-changing" but, as Levy himself acknowledges, Democracy in America is rarely so viewed in Europe, still less in France, where its author is typically dismissed as a temporizing aristocrat, a sitter on fences, a self-involved patrician in the style of Isaiah Berlin.

That was Levy's opinion too, until he applied himself, in preparation for his trip, to Tocqueville's text, to discover that it did indeed change the world. Thanks to Tocqueville, America became conscious of itself as a country with a destiny apart. As the story unfolds the reader is repeatedly struck by Levy's awed recognition of Tocqueville's powers of foresight and analysis. All that he encounters in the land of shopping malls, lap dancers, Elvis, and the Book of Mormon was foretold in outline by his predecessor, and provided, what is more, with a comprehensive theory. Levy attempts no theory of his own, but does what writers about America are so easily tempted to do, which is to offer vignettes of the crazy things that happen in a true democracy--things that ordinary people do, when provided with the freedom to do them and the money to pay.

Like Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, or Martin Amis in The Moronic Inferno, Levy is drawn to the grotesqueries of the democratic culture--the gated communities where only retired geriatrics are allowed to own a house; the Mormon project for the redemption of mankind through genealogical research; the glassy-smiled lap dancers who offer vicarious sex while carefully ensuring that no pleasure, affection, or excitement could conceivably attach to it; the big Gospel churches where God is packaged and branded to suit the needs of every client; and the prisons, which were for Levy, as they had been for Tocqueville, his first port of call. The result is a lively and in many ways revelatory account of the American people, which--while ostensibly directed against French anti-Americanism--shows exactly why the French find the Americans so hard to stomach. As Levy puts the point, America is obese, growing outwards not only in the bodies of its citizens, but in its heartless cities, its crowded prisons, its overflowing churches, its landscape-devouring shopping malls, its everexpanding roads, plazas, car parks, its "mausoleum of merchandise, the funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires"--in short, its fearful spilling of noise, needs, and niceness into every available space. America lacks poise, elegance, style, discretion. It has none of the self-irony with which the French contemplate the distasteful facts of human appetite, and therefore refuses to find them distasteful. It is, in short, a real democracy, in which ordinary people can put their ordinariness on display and not feel disgraced by it.

Tocqueville was the scion of an old noble family, and never lost the sense that he was looking down on the modern world from a ledge just above it. Levy is not an aristocrat, but he is the ...