Philosophy:Just as you should never judge a book by its cover, so you should also never judge a philosopher by his sartorial choices. But before I get into discussing the book under review, I do have to impart an anecdote about its author.
Bernard-Henry Lévy (or BHL as he is known throughout France) is a well-known habitué of the Café Flore on the Boulevard St Germain - which, as it happens, is around a 30-second walk from my Paris pied-à-terre. And recently - on a reasonably chilly November evening - I saw BHL holding court au premier étage du Flore, dressed in an immaculately tailored chalk-stripe suit . . . worn without a shirt.
It took a moment for this détail vestimentaire to register - and I had to work hard not to gawk or to wonder: have I been magically transported to Las Vegas? But, in fact, such a sartorial statement is comme d'habitude for France's most media-savvy intellectual - a man who has lived so much of his life in public, who doesn't think it a sin to be a clothes horse, or to appear in magazine spreads with his actress wife, or to show his pumped pectorals.
"He's a show off," is a comment one often hears in Paris about BHL. But whatever about his public persona, the fact remains that he is ferociously bright and quite fearless when it comes to articulating a position at odds with received opinion. As has been well documented in every profile and biographical sketch of the man, it was BHL who attacked Marxist ideology as immoral at a time when the French left still romantically embraced its doctrines. And it was BHL who simultaneously refused to embrace the Richard Perle/Paul Wolfowitz school of neo-con thought. Just as it was BHL who spoke out against Serbian genocide, and wrote an angry book about the appalling murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, by Islamic terrorists. And then there's his wildly rambling, frequently navel-gazing, but still compelling book on Sartre, and I could also mention a bad movie BHL directed and . . .
WHAT, IN SHORT, we are dealing with in the matter of BHL is a very French sort of polymath. And for all the accusations of amour propre directed against him, the New York boy in me admires his chutzpah - and the belief that such intellectual and personal flamboyance brightens the dull contours of quotidian life. Or to put it another way, I look upon BHL as a wholly modern construct - the celebrity philosopher, yet one whose analytical rigour is still intact.
Of course, if you believe those "fair and balanced" folk at Fox News (the Republican Party's very own Pravda), France is the most profoundly anti-American country in the western world (though my personal experience of the place over the past seven years is of a country in love with the best of American culture - our jazz, our cinema, our literature - and understandably sceptical of the Bush administration's Manichean world-view). But any neo-con picking up this book will be reassured to know that France's most public intellectual loathes anti-Americanism, finding it (rightfully) ignorant: "[ It's] one thing to show anti-Americanism has become the magnet that was missing since the collapse of the totalitarian megatheories: and now . . . is unleashing chauvinism, hegemonism, the thirst for purity, ethnocentrism, racism, anti-Semitism and, of course, fundamentalism.
"But it's altogether another thing to go out into the field, to judge on actual evidence; it's another thing to contrast that chimera with the concrete body and face of America today."
As can be gathered, Levy's prose style has its roots deep in the world of the academy - and this récit de voyage isn't notable for its descriptive powers (the man is no Bruce Chatwin). But in subtitling American Vertigo "In the Footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville", BHL isn't really trying to rewrite his compatriot's 1835 account of a journey across a nascent republic (a book, by the way, which is still taught in American schools and universities today as one of the better analyses of the US body politic ever written). Rather, BHL's episodic chronicle of a year's wayfaring around the States is more of a diffuse exploration into varying definitions of Americanness. He does time with writers (James Ellroy, Norman Mailer, Jim Harrison), with politicians from assorted ends of the political spectrum (Barack Obama), with a death row inmate, with Mormons, and creationists and Woody Allen and . . .
IT'S A VERY discursive book - and one that comes across largely as a sense of snapshots, which BHL uses, lecture-like, to illustrate a socio-political- philosophical thought. As such, though these brief rendezvous with manifold facets of Americana can be frequently intriguing, they come across as bitty.
He is not a natural when it comes to the basic of narration - and doesn't really know how to get the most out of a place or a personal encounter. Even his meeting with Bill Kristol - one of the high priests of neo-con thought - has no sense of shared discourse. He doesn't know how to report, but he certainly knows how to theorise.
But even if you find his epistemological excesses to be just a little de trop, there is still something laudable about a foreign writer who is so shrewdly in touch with the US's vast contradictions - yet who refuses to embrace the easy answer, the knee-jerk response. Like a good friend, he knows the points of weakness in our national persona. Like a good friend, he also appreciates the volcanic variety of country. He may have his stylistic idiosyncrasies, he may frequently veer into pretentiousness, but his book has a quirky originality that this American found bracing.
• Douglas Kennedy's next novel, The Woman in the Fifth, will be published by Hutchinson in June. He was awarded the French decoration, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, last year
American Vertigo: On the Road from Newport to Guant ánamo (In the Footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville) By Bernard-Henry Lévy Gibson Square, 384pp. £17.99