BHL revised.

June 23, Antioch.

Finally over with American Vertigo, the BHL book in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville in America (see BHL entry.)
A French friend of mine had a good laugh reading a scalding review of the book by one of my favorite journalists, Garrison Keillor, in the New York Times online, and passed it on (Anne is the mother of the most adorable two-year-old, Alicia, and lives in Paris with her Colombian husband, a sequence artist. She's my trusted resource for advice on the many stumbling blocks and potholes on the motherhood road - my own private baby consultant.)
I still found the book enjoyable (can't undo the French in me?) as it is easily read, divided in short vignettes on a place, a person, a theme, themselves grouped into chapters along the path taken by Tocqueville one hundred and seventy years earlier.
But (to paraphrase the author.) A travel book intended for foreign audiences, it does fall into that easiest of all trap, mainly focusing on the extreme, the freakish, the weird, and foregoing the million nuances in between the types altogether. It is rather as if I went around France presuming to explain the country to foreigners by stopping to chat only with presidential candidates, celebrities and pundits, visiting brothels, prisons, hipsters and famous writers.
Keillor's view is that Lévy, besides being a self-agrandizing snob, doesn't get America because he only stops to chat with the afore-mentioned pundits, politicians and celebrities ("Nobody tells a joke in this book; nobody eats a meal,") only focuses on the extreme and unusual (the gated communities of Sun City, Arizona, the Texas gun show,) turns every little mundane fact into some grand metaphor (pouring rain at the Clinton Library inauguration prefiguring the demise of the Democratic party,) and is a book more about the French than America. All true on all counts.
And then the grandiloquent, pompous language, the painfully long sentences (Faulkner, yes, Jim Harrison, yes, Lévy, definitely not) full of sub-sentences, the affectation of the style, the pompousness, again, of the whole thing, as if Lévy was listening to himself write (and I cringe when reading my entry on Rancho Cordova's public park as it seems I'd caught the bug myself.)
And the details, again. Los Angeles spreading over the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties no less, thereby reaffirming that French editors are geographically challenged, at least when it comes to the North American continent. And there I thought Americans' notion of geography was a safe laugh. Los Angeles, the "unreadable city," the un-city because lacking a center, a limit and a vantage point from which you can embrace its view (sic), Los Angeles, then, "a city without History" and thus without "historicity," and because of that a city Lévy says will soon die.
Last time I was in LA it seems pretty alive to me and nowhere on the road to impending demise but what do I know, I only lived there (since I lived in Riverside...) a couple of years as an average photojournalist going to the market for bread and paying my trailer-park rent, as opposed to driving through for a couple of days with a bunch of assistants in tow to sit down and talk with Sharon Stone in Beverly Hills.
(To be continued.)