French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy toured American and followed in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. Roger Scruton reviews the resulting book, American Vertigo, in NR:
Like Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, or Martin Amis in The Moronic Inferno, Lévy is drawn to the grotesqueries of the democratic culture — the gated communities where only retired geriatrics are allowed to own a house; the Mormon project for the redemption of mankind through genealogical research; the glassy-smiled lap dancers who offer vicarious sex while carefully ensuring that no pleasure, affection, or excitement could conceivably attach to it; the big Gospel churches where God is packaged and branded to suit the needs of every client; and the prisons, which were for Lévy, as they had been for Tocqueville, his first port of call...
As Lévy puts the point, America is obese, growing outwards not only in the bodies of its citizens, but in its heartless cities, its crowded prisons, its overflowing churches, its landscape-devouring shopping malls, its ever-expanding roads, plazas, car parks, its “mausoleum of merchandise, the funeral accumulation of false goods and non-desires” — in short, its fearful spilling of noise, needs, and niceness into every available space. America lacks poise, elegance, style, discretion. It has none of the self-irony with which the French contemplate the distasteful facts of human appetite, and therefore refuses to find them distasteful. It is, in short, a real democracy, in which ordinary people can put their ordinariness on display and not feel disgraced by it.
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It is not Lévy’s fault that his book has been made to stand beside Tocqueville’s, and of course it suffers from the comparison. Lévy is flippant and frothy where Tocqueville is sober and deep. Lévy lacks the quality that Dr. Johnson called “bottom” and his interest in day-to-day realities is too easily eclipsed by his appetite for the ludicrous. There is another America than the one described in this book — the America of volunteer groups, neighborliness, and little platoons. But that America makes no effective backdrop to the observing bohemian, and therefore defies Lévy’s self-centered style. It was this other America that Tocqueville saw, and that he recognized for what it is — a new start for mankind.
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