American Vertigo

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by Charlotte Mandell, 308 pages

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across the United States, a journey that ultimately resulted in the classic Democracy in America.  In 2004, Bernard-Henri Levy was contracted by The Atlantic magazine to conduct a new survey of American society.  The two French intellectuals, separated by nearly two centuries, could not be more different: Tocqueville was a Catholic aristocrat wary of "progress", Levy a Jewish liberal, albeit one somewhat estranged from the mainstream by his support for Israel.  Tocqueville wrote for a French audience, Levy for an American magazine.  In the 1830s, the United States was, for the French, a strange distant country with more wilderness than civilization, while by the beginning of the 21st century it was the global hegemon whose influence was unavoidable.

Levy states at the outset that Tocqueville means far more to Americans than to Frenchmen, and indeed his journey seems at times to owe more to On the Road and Easy Rider than Democracy in America - Levy is not exploring a new world, but rather a place he already knows, or thinks he knows.  Certainly it lacks Tocqueville's timelessness - a mere decade later and it is difficult not to smile at the quaintness of a time when Barack Obama was the harbinger of post-racial America and George W Bush was Literally Hitler.  For a long road trip, Levy is an interesting and (despite occasional fits of snobbishness) consistently charming companion, but, sadly, there are no surprises on this journey.  Generally, Levy seems remarkably incurious - he arrives in the US with his conclusions already solidly in place, with the result that most of the book reads as if it could have been written even had he stayed at home.