// literary & arts //
Spring 2006
On the Road with BHL
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American Vertigo:
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I need to begin this review by confessing, head bowed in shame, that I have never actually read more than a few pages of Democracy in America. One summer I tried the original French, but quickly abandoned the attempt after repeatedly getting stuck on a word that my dictionary unhelpfully translated as "formerly of yore." It was shortly after I was asked to review Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book that I remembered that I lacked this crucial arrow in my intellectual quiver, and at first I wondered how I could give "BHL" (as the French, it is said, love to call him) a fair reading. On some further reflection, however, I realized that most of the intended audience for American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville--that is, the demographic target of The Atlantic Monthly, which commissioned Lévy's project—has not read Tocqueville either. I do not, therefore, consider myself handicapped as a reviewer. I am the perfect intelligent layman.
As Martin Peretz pointed out in The New Republic, however, had I been a more informed layman, I might have recognized Tocqueville's echoes in "the tropes and the concepts so deftly deployed by the learned Lévy." Peretz wrote his essay, entitled "BHL USA," in response to Garrison Keillor's very funny but somewhat unfair trashing of American Vertigo in The New York Times Book Review, in which the host of A Prairie Home Companionberated Lévy for being "short on facts, long on conclusions," and parodied his "splatter-paint prose style." Peretz might be right, but I sympathize with Keillor: nothing can change the fact that this is an infuriating book to read.
The first two hundred and forty pages of American Vertigo are separated into a half dozen or so chapters, and within each a number of short pieces have been crafted to appear as though they are entries from Lévy's journal. After only a few pages of Lévy's prose I dreaded what I would have to endure. Of course it's possible to separate style from substance: clever writing can paper over holes in an argument, and brilliant reasoning can make a dreadfully dry book a thrill to read. Lévy's style and his substance, however, have become inextricably intertwined. We can see directly into his thoughts because he has put them straight onto the page. When a sentence goes on for line after line, and sentences like it go on for page after page, we cannot help but imagine we are thinking along with Lévy as he ponders what he has examined of the country on his journey so far, looks at what slice of America he is observing at that moment, and considers what parts unknown he is yet to visit; but Keillor is wrong, Lévy is not short on facts but long on conclusions, Lévy is short on both facts and conclusions; instead he just talks, for page after page, and sees everything without observing very much at all; the sentences go on and on; Lévy tells us some more of what he sees dawdles; and a sentence like this one had better have a big payoff, because it is extraordinarily draining to read, page after page; and it gets tiring; but instead, in Lévy's book, it just ends, like this. Maybe this is, as someone objected to me, just how some French writers write—Lévy, in his introduction, boasts of an "undulating" style—but never before American Vertigo had I felt it acceptable behavior to put down a book in the middle of a sentence.
Lévy also has an infuriating way of introducing his points by using isolated, pointless sentences.
I was willing to give Lévy the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to slog through his regrettable stylistic choices if I would be rewarded, in the end, by startling and acute insights. Let's take as an example the part of the book in which Lévy muses on Los Angeles for three or four pages. He begins with an observation of Roland Barthes's that "a city is like a text," and then tells us that it has no center and no border, that it is too big to take in from any one spot, and that it has no organic, "pulsating" heart from which it has historically emerged and continues to draw its force of life—all of which, he says, a "legible" city requires. (I'm not so sure New York meets all or any of those criteria, but Lévy loves this place.) The diary entries are like larger versions of his unfulfilling sentences, and the lesson of Los Angeles is that "an unintelligible city is a city whose historicity is nothing more than an ageless remorse." What does that even mean? Lévy thinks Los Angeles will die because it is "posthistorical," but cities die because they have no future, not because they have no past. When Lévy is finished we have learned nothing about L.A. except that it is big.
The section on Los Angeles is one of the more extreme examples of the ultimate problem with the book, which is that for all of Lévy's observational powers–and he does display them, in brief flashes of inspiration, everywhere he goes–he says very little that we haven't heard before. Detroit is dying. Americans are fat, but not really that much fatter than people in other countries. John Kerry is boring. The Democratic party is obsessed with fundraising. And then Lévy surprises us: fundamentalist Christians are not evil. Air Force pilots are not storm troopers. Guantánamo Bay is troubling for what it says about America's willingness to compromise its moral values.
There is nothing wrong with any of these conclusions, except that we have read them all before. If you read The New York Times, The Economist, orSlate, on anything like a regular basis, you know almost everything that Lévy is going to say, almost everywhere he goes. Lévy's analysis is solid and his conclusions incontrovertible, but only because there is very little that will be controversial to the readers of this book. Occasionally Lévy does make insightful points. He worries, for example, that our society's rhetorical and legal crusade against obesity bears a frightening resemblance to the eugenic policies that marred this country for much of the century. But that was the first time Lévy surprised me, a hundred pages into the book. Even Peretz acknowledges, probably unintentionally, that his beloved BHL rarely breaks any new ground. Lévy is "baffled by the predicament" of America's minorities, just as Tocqueville was—but Peretz adds,"anyone who is not is a fool." Lévy's lack of foolishness is not a particularly good reason to listen to him.
What is especially numbing about the book is that Lévy has absolutely no sense of humor, which is especially unfortunate considering the immense comic material in the book. Near the end of his journey Lévy's daughter gives birth and Lévy must fly to Paris, hop on a motorcycle to visit his grandchild, and then return to Charles de Gaulle two hours later to board the same plane so that he can return in time for an important interview. But he gets flagged by the computer system at the airport for having an unusual itinerary. This could be very funny—and his whole intention in this section is supposedly the absurdity of our security neurosis—but Lévy blows his opportunity, just as he does when he describes the ritualistic rejection of America's rent check for Guantánamo, just as he does when he is refused a meeting with Kerry because it might make the candidate seem too French. The only joke in the whole book comes when Lévy points out that, in France, "neocon" sounds a lot like "neo" plus "con," a fabulously obscene insult.
The crime, therefore, of "Le Voyage en Amerique," the diary-like portion of the book, is not that it is bad but that it is a waste of time. Fortunately, the travelogue itself only occupies the first two hundred and forty pages. The remaining seventy are titled "Reflections," and by its name you might imagine–wrongly, of course–that the latter contains Lévy's well-considered musings on his year-long journey, since he is freed from the constraint of writing in short vignettes. But in fact the last section contains only sporadic references to what has preceded it. Instead, it is much more closely tied to the last part of his wandering, after he returns to the East Coast, in which he interviews the most prominent neocons in America.
On the subject of the neocons, Lévy at last says things that are not often said. "Who exactly are these sorcerers' apprentices, these princes of darkness, these mercenaries of vileness [!], these superhawks, these vampires?" His answer is that they are none of those things: there could easily be worse opponents than neoconservatives. Lévy is impressed with their intellectual powers; every one of them has an alternate career as a renowned classicist or mathematician or historian. More importantly, while you can disagree with all of their conclusions, if you read what they write and listen carefully to what they say, you find that at least they are thinking in big, idealistic, intellectual terms. "Here we have the only example, I reckon, of a major modern country adding considerations drawn from Thucydides or Leo Strauss to its diplomacy," Lévy writes. When he meets Bill Kristol, editor ofThe Weekly Standard, he asks why, in the pursuit of noble and universalist ideas about the spreading of democracy, it is necessary for neocons to hitch themselves to every other hare-brained or malicious domestic policy of the Bush Administration. Kristol doesn't have a satisfactory answer, but Lévy is impressed enough by the neocons to differentiate between them and Samuel Huntington, whom he meets, inebriates, and goads into admitting that he thinks "the big problem with Hispanics is that they don't like education!" (Lévy, of course, misses the humor.) Huntington is just a racist and a nativist, but for left-leaning intellectuals, Lévy's heroes, the neocons are worthy enemies.
The book concludes with a meditation on the role of the United States in the world and on four different types of American thinking about its relationship to the rest of the globe, but again, unfortunately, there is nothing new. (Those looking for a truly impressive analysis of America's Janus-like foreign affairs should read the much superior America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, published last year and written by the British journalist Anatol Lieven.) Lévy's prediction is that America is not really all that much like the Roman Empire any more, since it is hardly united at home, and because of that internal debate it is not going to collapse any time soon. At least, I think that's what he says in the last dozen pages; to be honest I had had enough, and my mind had left for my next book, which will be, of course, Democracy in America.
As Martin Peretz pointed out in The New Republic, however, had I been a more informed layman, I might have recognized Tocqueville's echoes in "the tropes and the concepts so deftly deployed by the learned Lévy." Peretz wrote his essay, entitled "BHL USA," in response to Garrison Keillor's very funny but somewhat unfair trashing of American Vertigo in The New York Times Book Review, in which the host of A Prairie Home Companionberated Lévy for being "short on facts, long on conclusions," and parodied his "splatter-paint prose style." Peretz might be right, but I sympathize with Keillor: nothing can change the fact that this is an infuriating book to read.
The first two hundred and forty pages of American Vertigo are separated into a half dozen or so chapters, and within each a number of short pieces have been crafted to appear as though they are entries from Lévy's journal. After only a few pages of Lévy's prose I dreaded what I would have to endure. Of course it's possible to separate style from substance: clever writing can paper over holes in an argument, and brilliant reasoning can make a dreadfully dry book a thrill to read. Lévy's style and his substance, however, have become inextricably intertwined. We can see directly into his thoughts because he has put them straight onto the page. When a sentence goes on for line after line, and sentences like it go on for page after page, we cannot help but imagine we are thinking along with Lévy as he ponders what he has examined of the country on his journey so far, looks at what slice of America he is observing at that moment, and considers what parts unknown he is yet to visit; but Keillor is wrong, Lévy is not short on facts but long on conclusions, Lévy is short on both facts and conclusions; instead he just talks, for page after page, and sees everything without observing very much at all; the sentences go on and on; Lévy tells us some more of what he sees dawdles; and a sentence like this one had better have a big payoff, because it is extraordinarily draining to read, page after page; and it gets tiring; but instead, in Lévy's book, it just ends, like this. Maybe this is, as someone objected to me, just how some French writers write—Lévy, in his introduction, boasts of an "undulating" style—but never before American Vertigo had I felt it acceptable behavior to put down a book in the middle of a sentence.
Lévy also has an infuriating way of introducing his points by using isolated, pointless sentences.
I was willing to give Lévy the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to slog through his regrettable stylistic choices if I would be rewarded, in the end, by startling and acute insights. Let's take as an example the part of the book in which Lévy muses on Los Angeles for three or four pages. He begins with an observation of Roland Barthes's that "a city is like a text," and then tells us that it has no center and no border, that it is too big to take in from any one spot, and that it has no organic, "pulsating" heart from which it has historically emerged and continues to draw its force of life—all of which, he says, a "legible" city requires. (I'm not so sure New York meets all or any of those criteria, but Lévy loves this place.) The diary entries are like larger versions of his unfulfilling sentences, and the lesson of Los Angeles is that "an unintelligible city is a city whose historicity is nothing more than an ageless remorse." What does that even mean? Lévy thinks Los Angeles will die because it is "posthistorical," but cities die because they have no future, not because they have no past. When Lévy is finished we have learned nothing about L.A. except that it is big.
The section on Los Angeles is one of the more extreme examples of the ultimate problem with the book, which is that for all of Lévy's observational powers–and he does display them, in brief flashes of inspiration, everywhere he goes–he says very little that we haven't heard before. Detroit is dying. Americans are fat, but not really that much fatter than people in other countries. John Kerry is boring. The Democratic party is obsessed with fundraising. And then Lévy surprises us: fundamentalist Christians are not evil. Air Force pilots are not storm troopers. Guantánamo Bay is troubling for what it says about America's willingness to compromise its moral values.
There is nothing wrong with any of these conclusions, except that we have read them all before. If you read The New York Times, The Economist, orSlate, on anything like a regular basis, you know almost everything that Lévy is going to say, almost everywhere he goes. Lévy's analysis is solid and his conclusions incontrovertible, but only because there is very little that will be controversial to the readers of this book. Occasionally Lévy does make insightful points. He worries, for example, that our society's rhetorical and legal crusade against obesity bears a frightening resemblance to the eugenic policies that marred this country for much of the century. But that was the first time Lévy surprised me, a hundred pages into the book. Even Peretz acknowledges, probably unintentionally, that his beloved BHL rarely breaks any new ground. Lévy is "baffled by the predicament" of America's minorities, just as Tocqueville was—but Peretz adds,"anyone who is not is a fool." Lévy's lack of foolishness is not a particularly good reason to listen to him.
What is especially numbing about the book is that Lévy has absolutely no sense of humor, which is especially unfortunate considering the immense comic material in the book. Near the end of his journey Lévy's daughter gives birth and Lévy must fly to Paris, hop on a motorcycle to visit his grandchild, and then return to Charles de Gaulle two hours later to board the same plane so that he can return in time for an important interview. But he gets flagged by the computer system at the airport for having an unusual itinerary. This could be very funny—and his whole intention in this section is supposedly the absurdity of our security neurosis—but Lévy blows his opportunity, just as he does when he describes the ritualistic rejection of America's rent check for Guantánamo, just as he does when he is refused a meeting with Kerry because it might make the candidate seem too French. The only joke in the whole book comes when Lévy points out that, in France, "neocon" sounds a lot like "neo" plus "con," a fabulously obscene insult.
The crime, therefore, of "Le Voyage en Amerique," the diary-like portion of the book, is not that it is bad but that it is a waste of time. Fortunately, the travelogue itself only occupies the first two hundred and forty pages. The remaining seventy are titled "Reflections," and by its name you might imagine–wrongly, of course–that the latter contains Lévy's well-considered musings on his year-long journey, since he is freed from the constraint of writing in short vignettes. But in fact the last section contains only sporadic references to what has preceded it. Instead, it is much more closely tied to the last part of his wandering, after he returns to the East Coast, in which he interviews the most prominent neocons in America.
On the subject of the neocons, Lévy at last says things that are not often said. "Who exactly are these sorcerers' apprentices, these princes of darkness, these mercenaries of vileness [!], these superhawks, these vampires?" His answer is that they are none of those things: there could easily be worse opponents than neoconservatives. Lévy is impressed with their intellectual powers; every one of them has an alternate career as a renowned classicist or mathematician or historian. More importantly, while you can disagree with all of their conclusions, if you read what they write and listen carefully to what they say, you find that at least they are thinking in big, idealistic, intellectual terms. "Here we have the only example, I reckon, of a major modern country adding considerations drawn from Thucydides or Leo Strauss to its diplomacy," Lévy writes. When he meets Bill Kristol, editor ofThe Weekly Standard, he asks why, in the pursuit of noble and universalist ideas about the spreading of democracy, it is necessary for neocons to hitch themselves to every other hare-brained or malicious domestic policy of the Bush Administration. Kristol doesn't have a satisfactory answer, but Lévy is impressed enough by the neocons to differentiate between them and Samuel Huntington, whom he meets, inebriates, and goads into admitting that he thinks "the big problem with Hispanics is that they don't like education!" (Lévy, of course, misses the humor.) Huntington is just a racist and a nativist, but for left-leaning intellectuals, Lévy's heroes, the neocons are worthy enemies.
The book concludes with a meditation on the role of the United States in the world and on four different types of American thinking about its relationship to the rest of the globe, but again, unfortunately, there is nothing new. (Those looking for a truly impressive analysis of America's Janus-like foreign affairs should read the much superior America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, published last year and written by the British journalist Anatol Lieven.) Lévy's prediction is that America is not really all that much like the Roman Empire any more, since it is hardly united at home, and because of that internal debate it is not going to collapse any time soon. At least, I think that's what he says in the last dozen pages; to be honest I had had enough, and my mind had left for my next book, which will be, of course, Democracy in America.
// DAVID SINGERMAN is a Columbia College senior and editor of The Current. He is majoring in American history.