Rusty Hitch

I was not much surprised to read Chris Hitchens over at Slate, defending his friend Bernard Henri Levy from Garrison Keillor’s scurillous review of American Vertigo. While Hitch wins points for style as ever –“turkey-wattled congressmen” and “the Homer of Middle America”, he shoots, he scores!–I have to say that he almost entirely missed the point of Keillor’s review. While others found the review more humorous than I did, its laugh track perfectly paralleled Keillor’s straight quotation of excrutiatingly cliched interpretations of Americana. So within the realm of dueling reviews, I have to say that Keillor provides a lot more evidence for his more tenable argument that Levy basically doesn’t have a clue, and it’s emphatically not because he somehow overlooked Lake Woebegon in his travels, as Hitch would have you believe. It is, in a sense, merely tit-for-tat-for-tit. The Frenchman reduces his America to a saccharine shot of lukewarm cliches, the American takes a sip and spits it out, and the boozy Brit drops his coat on the floor and starts in on the “vulgar, nativist American” nonsense. Vulgar, of course, means common–and Keillor’s populist shtick (Hitch perhaps started in on the Scotch too early in the review to recognize that it was, in fact, shtick) is precisely the antidote to Anglo-Franco-American miscommunication that is needed, but it is a shtick that almost always is too subtle for British ears, which are most finely tuned to the extremes of the King’s English or the Cockney wallows. I’m usually not that interested in these reviews of reviews, unless the principals take their gloves off–in part, because there is a reason Keillor was asked to review the book in the first place, not the bad-breathed Hitchens. And I’m loathe to review a review of a review, but what the hey. I fear Keillor has, in recent years, lost energy for the public parley, the way he used to do. Still, it would be fun to read him responding to Hitch, since Keillor is more than the expat’s equal, and has the advantage of a native’s sober understanding of the quick jab and the non-nonsense uppercut, so easy to land when a man like Hitch is running around the ring loudly protesting what he in the first place misread.