Those French

I love reading tales of travel, especially when you get to meet characters and get taken to off-the-beaten path kind of places. (Blue Highways )

So I was very interested in the review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,' by Bernard-Henri Lévy in the NYT this morning.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years.

There's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food.

It dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

I did buy an issue or two of the Atlantic when it was running this serial, and I gave up, finding it tedious. This review amused me to death, and then, the big surprise.

The reviewer? Garrison Keillor.

This is without doubt the first thing he has done that I’ve appreciated.