America: Europeans have been struggling to understand America for more than 500 years but none has succeeded like Alexis de Tocqueville, a 26-year-old French aristocrat who spent a year in the country in 1831.
Tocqueville came to make a survey of the prison system but his journey across America inspired a two-volume masterpiece, Democracy in America, that remains today the most insightful book ever written about the country.
Last year, The Atlantic Monthly asked French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy to retrace Tocqueville's journey and the result is a book that has America's chattering classes at each other's throats.
American Vertigo - Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville is a travel book with attitude, a melange of reporting, philosophical musing and interviews with the rich and famous.
Lévy goes everywhere, from the Mall of America in Minnesota to the Willow Creek mega-church near Chicago, taking in a brothel in Nevada and a partner-swapping club in San Francisco.
He climbs aboard a nuclear submarine, looks in on a gun show, checks out Graceland and calls on the Amish in Pennsylvania and the Mormons in Utah.
Lévy meets Warren Beatty, Sharon Stone, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen and argues with neoconservatives Richard Perle and Bill Kristol. Lévy and Stone talk about the Iraq war, which the Hollywood star opposes, piling on the details about dead marines and grieving mothers.
"She unfolds her legs, refolds them, pulls at the hem of her skirt with the gesture of a flirt who's trying to act virtuous, sighs deeply, takes her time, and finally gives me a look that is already outraged by what she's going to say," Lévy writes.
Like most Europeans, Lévy is intrigued by the place of religion in American life and his visit to Willow Creek - "The banks in America look like churches. But here is a church that looks like a bank" - prompts some reflections on how differently God is perceived on both sides of the Atlantic.
"What is obvious is the power of a religion whose secret is, perhaps, simply to get rid of the distance, the transcendence, and the remoteness of the divine that are at the heart of European theologies. A present God this time; a God who is there, behind the door or the curtain, and asks only to show himself; a God without mystery; a good-guy God, almost a human being, a good American, someone who loves you one by one, listens to you if you talk to him, answers if you ask him to - God, the friend who has your best interests at heart," he writes.
Like Tocqueville, Lévy investigates the American prison system, starting at New York's Rikers Island, where he watches in shock as a male prisoner masturbates in front of an impassive female guard. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana he visits a prison for inmates serving life sentences or condemned to death, none of whom have any prospect of parole.
"How can you live when there's no hope for anything? How do you bear prison life when you know that, no matter what you do, you'll only exit by dying?" he asks.
Finally, Lévy spends three days at Guantanamo Bay, where he recognises many of the characteristics of other American prisons, notably the undertow of violence and the policy of isolation and abandonment.
"You can argue about whether or not Guantanamo should be closed . . . What you cannot possibly say is that Guantanamo is a UFO, fallen from some unknown, obscure disaster. What you are bound to recognise is that it is a miniature, a condensation, of the entire American prison system," he writes.
Lévy is the most pro-American of European intellectuals whose condemnation of "Islamo-fascism" has made him a darling of the right, but his book has struck a touchy nerve in some American reviewers.
In a sneering review in the New York Times, Garrison Keillor dismissed the book as "the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years".
Lévy concludes that the American model, despite its difficulties, is far from the collapse predicted by some Europeans, but Keillor was not impressed by this vote of confidence.
"Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming.
"Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?" he wrote.
Lévy's champions hit back quickly, led by New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, who dismissed Keillor as a peddler of "middlebrow American sentimentality" who had waded in out of his depth.
The author himself was more restrained, describing the review as well-written but out of character with the welcome offered him by most Americans.
"In all my travels across America, I didn't meet a single Francophobe.
"But the New York Times article gave me venom on a dish," he said.
