Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
Random House; translated by Charlotte Mendel
308 pp., $24.95
As the self-proclaimed greatest living French philosopher and "prophet," and with the chutzpah to compare himself to Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac, Bernard-Henri Lévy has a lot to live up to. Instead of doing so, in "American Vertigo: Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville," (Random House, 308 pp., $24.95, translated by Charlotte Mendel), he presents a textbook demonstration of the adage that those who boast the loudest most often have the least to boast about.
Lévy, a prolific French author-activist, spends his time courting the press, pursuing various causes and relaxing by the pool at his Marrakech palace with his movie-star wife, Arielle Dombasle. The author of some 30 books, Lévy is breathlessly described by his publisher as no less than "France's leading writer" and by Vanity Fair magazine in a recent profile as a "superman and prophet: We have no equivalent in the United States."
Excuse me? If this is "France's leading writer," then that's a sad statement indeed for the state of the French Academy.
Lévy was commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly magazine to travel the United States, in an effort to duplicate Alexis de Tocqueville's own journey, made famous by his 1831 book, "Democracy in America." De Tocqueville's thoughtful observations about America and the American democratic experiment are among the most influential political analyses ever written on the subject. The book, in print for more than 150 years, is a classic of political literature and few, if any, foreign writers have ever come close to de Tocqueville's trenchant observations.
The suggestion that Lévy, the playboy gadfly of the French intellectual set, could "follow in his footsteps" is a dubious concept from the outset, and the actual product proves even worse.
Lévy's overblown style combines ceaseless name-dropping, merciless redundancy and horrific verbosity in one toxic combination. An editor could have easily reduced this entire volume by some 75 percent without losing a single important thought. Lévy manages, in the introduction, to launch sentences that ramble through villages, streams and forests without punctuation, pause, or even the suggestion of a period for nearly a full page. Whew. Is this mash-up of thoughts supposed to impress the reader or simply beat him or her into submission?
Worse, Lévy has the gall to compare himself, at the outset, with both de Tocqueville and Jack Kerouac. He would have profited mightily by setting his sights just a bit lower. Lévy set out to follow de Tocqueville's travels and, with a handful of exceptions, followed his path. He devotes short chapters to describing what he found. From the monstrosity of Mount Rushmore to the foggy city of San Francisco, Lévy catalogs a variety of American sights, cities and movements. He devotes an adoring chapter to Seattle, in which he declares that he "loved absolutely everything about Seattle" (although he uncharacteristically manages to convey his thoughts on the subject a pithy three pages). But for all the arm-waving, the author provides precious little political analysis or thoughtful observation about his travels, America after the turn of the millennium, or its status as the world's only superpower on a lonely nation-building mission to remake the world (or at least parts of it). The book reads more like a compendium of jumbo postcards written by a pompous European observer with a short attention span and an apparently straying intellectual curiosity. Surely, we can do better than this. France arguably laid the very foundation of American democracy — funding the revolution when there were precious few others willing to underwrite such a ragtag collection of rebels; contributing some of the most potent strands of political theory embraced by the revolutionaries; and, half a century later, contributing an astonishingly thoughtful observer, in de Tocqueville, to catalog the American experiment as it unfolded. Unfortunately, however, Lévy's return engagement fails to provide any fresh insight. Instead, it serves as a rather dramatic reminder (at least for those intrepid enough actually to finish the book) that the value of an idea or an observation is far more often measured by its perceptivity or originality, rather than the lifestyle of its author or the sheer volume of ink used in its printing.
