Book mania in the LA Times

Well, maybe not mania, but a good showing for books in the Sunday edition. Perhaps they're revving up for April. Here's what caught my eye:

• Bernard-Henri Levy channels Tocqueville. In American Vertigo, which came out on Tuesday, Levy, who I last read exploring Daniel Pearl's murder, decides on another roadtrip to figure out America. The profile is notable for announcing that Levy doesn't much like Los Angeles, and for his take on what nationality means for different nations:

  "In France, nationality is considered something that should be granted immediately and without a republican pledge," he said. "In America, there's a kind of course to follow that makes it more difficult, and once the process is achieved it's much more solidly anchored…. The machine that assembles Americans, the factory that produces citizens, works.
  
  "What's right about the American model is accepting ethnic communities as a basis for creating citizens. What's bad about the French model is denying ethnicity in order to conjure a citizen who remains imaginary."

  The review, in which Marianne Wiggins shows a snarky side, notes that Levy seeks out an incomplete picture of America; rather than find a cross-section of the nation, he grativtates to "a milieu more comfortable to him: an A-list of stars and headliners at home and at work in privileged, white America" All of which suggests that it may not be a perfect book, but is probably a fairly entertaining one.
• A review of Jorge Franco's All the Wrong Places discusses Franco's complicated relationship with the magical realist writers he seeks to replace:

  Revolutions are the stuff of literature. In fact, literary movements begin only when new generations of writers set to killing their forebears in an effort to find their voice. The rhetoric of iconoclasm and revolution may be fascinating, but the iconoclasm and revolution are never as total as the rhetoric would suggest.

• And finally, I am very excited to hear about Kiran Desai's second novel, per Jenifer Berman, avoids the sophomore slump. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was an absolute joy, and while her new effort, The Inheritance of Loss, sounds much darker, it also sounds richer. Berman calls it "a deft and often witty commentary on cultural issues that are all too familiar in an interconnected world where immigration - and the accompanying blight of bigotry - have become an international norm." Even better, she applauds Desai's "innate sense of humor and her genuine compassion for her characters." Expect to see more on this novel on this site in months to come.