Stranger in our land

On the Road Avec M. Lévy

Garrison Keillor in the The Times Book Review: 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....

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. ...

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "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?

Sometimes it's just too easy.

Garrison Keillor's great. If aliens ever come and want each country to send one ambassador, he's on the short list of people I'd want to represent all Americans. (Along with John McCain, Yo Yo Ma, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman, Warren Buffet... all people who get being American, and seem decent.)

The Times, for once, made an inspired choice in its book reviewer. Who better to prick the oh-so-French philosopher/author/celebrity Lévy than this man from Minnesota.

Lévy, like most Europeans, will never get America because they can't grasp the breadth of this country. They'll never understand why the same country that produced Jefferson and Elvis can be at least as proud of the King as the slave-holder. They don't get our careless confidence, our wide-eyed optimism, our self-absorption that co-exists with a genuine desire to do good in the world. They don't get why we haven't collapsed under the force of our contradictions and our diversity--why we've yet to choke on what we've bitten off. And they definitely don't get why we don't care what some philosopher prince from France think about us.

Unless, of course, Oprah picks him for her book club.

Photo by Peter Foley/European Pressphoto in the New York Times.