www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29keillor.html
France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lvy 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, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts;
John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. 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. In New Orleans, a young woman takes off her clothes on a balcony as young men throw Mardi Gras beads up at her. At the stock car race, Lvy senses that the spectators "both dread and hope for an accident." We learn that Los Angeles has no center and is one of the most polluted cities in the country. "Headed for Virginia, and for Norfolk, which is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the oldest towns in a state that was one of the original 13 in the union," Lvy writes. He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "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." 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. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren't a big part of everyday life.
Bud Selig once laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, where Abner Doubleday is also buried, Lvy goes out of his mind. An event important only to Selig and his immediate family becomes, to Lvy, an official proclamation "before the eyes of America and the world" of Abner as "the pope of the national religion .
United States joined in a celebration that had the twofold merit of associating the national pastime with the traditional rural values that Fenimore Cooper's town embodies and also with the patriotic grandeur that the name Doubleday bears." Negatory on "pope" and "national" and "entire" and "most" and "embodies" and "Doubleday."
He admires Warren Beatty, though he sees Beatty at a public event "among these rich and beautiful who, as always in America . form a masquerade of the living dead, each one more facelifted and mummified than the next, fierce, a little mutant-looking, inhuman, ultimately disappointing." Lvy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lvy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lvy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. With his X-ray vision, Lvy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound. And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox - America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans' party loyalty is "very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty." Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both "libertine" and "conventional," "depraved" and "proper." And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lvy's tedious and original thinking: "A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high - extremely high - symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one." Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?" "What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?"
Hillary Clinton, in which Lvy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lvy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? 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; I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model." For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of "A Prairie Home Companion" and the author of 16 books. He is the editor, most recently, of an anthology titled "Good Poems for Hard Times." Correction: Jan 29, 2006, Sunday: A note on Page 1 of the Book Review today, with the review of "American Vertigo" by Bernard-Henri Lvy, misstates the translator's name.
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