American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville

The New Yorker

When Tocqueville wrote “Democracy in America,” in the eighteen-thirties, it seemed as if only a foreigner could identify the essence of American culture. Now Lévy, a new kind of French aristocrat, has retraced his steps, travelling through our malls and megachurches and prisons. Lévy’s writing has always been an arms race between shrewd observation and rapt self-absorption, but that’s not the only problem here. The outsider’s advantage is to see things fresh; his disadvantage is that he doesn’t know when his observations are anything but fresh. In recent decades, our national self-scrutiny has spawned a library of its own—Joan Didion, Christopher Lasch, Mike Davis, Richard Sennett, Thomas Frank—and the time is long past when extracting profundities from the Mall of America seemed daring, rather than trite. Lévy’s hortatory prose seethes with provocation and paradox; the trouble is that so many of his observations are so stale and predictable.

Publishers Weekly

Levy's journey through this "magnificent, mad country" is indeed vertiginous as he loops from coast to coast and back, mounting to the heights of wealth and power-interviewing the likes of Barry Diller and John Kerry-and plunging into the depths of poverty and powerlessness, in urban ghettoes and prisons. (In this last, he truly follows Tocqueville, whose assignment in the young America was to visit prisons.) Each scene is quite short, which is frustrating at first, but soon the quick succession of images creates a jostling, animated portrait of America, full of resonances and contradictions. Sharon Stone in her luxurious home, railing about the misery of the poor, is quickly followed by Levy's chat with a waitress in a Colorado town struggling to make ends meet. A gated retirement community in Arizona seems to the author like a prison, while Angola, a prison in Louisiana, has lush grounds that resemble a retirement community's. Levy (Who Killed Daniel Pearl), the celebrated French thinker and journalist, is a master of the vignette and the miniature, whether explaining why he could feel at home in Seattle or pondering whether Diller's apparent amorality is "too flaunted to be completely sincere." In France, where anti-Americanism has been so popular, Levy has been an anti-anti-Americanist, and while he finds serious fissures in this country's social landscape, in the end he is an optimist about the future of a country he admires for the richness of its culture and its political vision. (Feb. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this wide-ranging exploration, Levy (Who Killed Daniel Pearl), the French filmmaker, philosopher, and journalist, attempts to paint a portrait of contemporary America and Americans. Interviewing strippers, prison guards, college students, clergymen, doctors, writers, actors, and politicians (among many others), he travels across the country observing and analyzing a nation he has gradually come to respect and like. He compares his task to that of another Frenchman-Alexis de Tocqueville-whose classic Democracy in America (1835) clearly and sympathetically differentiated American culture from European society by noting how the ethic of individualism and the value of political freedom helped create a more pure form of democracy. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Levy fills his account with a preponderance of criticism about almost everyone and everything: European anti-Americanism, Bush's "small-mindedness," the Christian Right, and the "Puritanism" of MoveOn.org. Although his often page-long sentences and dash-filled thought fragments are full of passion and commitment, they may also confuse readers. (And why does he call Pat Buchanan a "Jeffersonian" and Dick Cheney a "Jacksonian"?) His interviews often come across as monolog rather than dialog. Many readers may feel more vertigo from his shoot-from-the-hip commentary than Levy himself experienced in his travels. For larger libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/05.]-Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Nearly two decades after Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy in America, a French intellectual reassesses the cultural and political climate in the U.S. and, surprise, finds much to criticize. Tocqueville officially journeyed to America to investigate its prisons, and Levy takes a lame swipe at this and at following his celebrated countryman's itinerary. But his focus, like that of Tocqueville, is really on understanding American democracy. The author poses as a sympathetic interlocutor, hopeful about the country's future, yet he appears to abandon few preconceptions and, instead, conforms to every cliche Americans hold about European intellectuals. Levy (Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, 2004, etc.) laments the decay of the country's northern cities and the crassness of thos. He abhors our prisons, derides our museums and monuments, and has nothing but contempt for organized religion, except when practiced by oppressed blacks. Interviews with left-leaning politicos and celebrities-John Kerry, Sharon Stone, Ron Reagan, Barack Obama, Morris Dees, Charlie Rose and Woody Allen-never fail to charm the author. Anyone to the political right, any confirmed capitalist, and certainly George W. Bush, leave him either baffled or hostile. Periodic attempts at what passes among academic elites for "authenticity"-interviews with a waitress, a lap dancer, a retiree, a prostitute-come off as laughable. You know you're in the hands of a hopelessly adrift narrator when, attending a University of Texas class devoted to Tocqueville, he is stunned to discover liberal sentiments among the students and wonders if this could be a new American trend. Imagine!Those sharing Levy's politics will find comfort in hisanalysis; others will be dismayed by his banal observations and tiresome predictability.