The Borat tour

For the high-minded foreigner, traveling in America can be a dangerous business. Look what happened to Bernard-Henri Levy. In January of last year the glamorous and respected French public intellectual -- who has accepted the term "anti-anti-American" as a definition of his attitude toward this country -- published his philosophical travelogue "American Vertigo" (Random House) and found himself promptly dismantled on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was Garrison Keillor, gatekeeper of the Midwest, and he had almost too much fun: Dewlaps a-rumble, he charged Levy with bombast, grandiosity, and -- most witheringly -- a "childlike love of paradox." He quoted mercilessly from Levy's flightiest speculations and mocked his heaviest thoughts. He used the phrase "term paper." It was brutal.

Introducing the American edition of his book "The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures," published last week by Da Capo Press, Louis Theroux makes wary reference to the Keillor/Levy takedown, recognizing that he is to some extent on the same "Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics and Faux Culture Excursion" -- the Borat tour, essentially -- for which Keillor so derided the visiting Frenchman. Levy, in his researches into American-ness, goes to Dealey Plaza; a gun show; a stock-car race; Sharon Stone's house; a brothel. Theroux, in his, goes to a militia encampment; a porn shoot; a White Power rally; Ike Turner's house; and a brothel.

But what happens to the two writers in these places is very different -- particularly in the brothels. To read Levy on the working girls of Nevada's Chicken Ranch is to find oneself turning, more or less, into Garrison Keillor. As the sage contemplates a lineup of four women and wearily selects "the least pathetic one" it becomes harder and harder to override a regrettably Francophobic indignation. Who is this haughty Frenchman? Having made his choice, Levy repairs with the lucky lady to "a bedroom hung with makeshift drapes" and creakily interrogates her about his various concerns: why the flag flying outside the establishment is so big, for example. The woman goes predictably mute, calls him "sir." Prostitution, he concludes, is the "obscene nether side" of American Puritanism.

Louis Theroux, on the other hand, at Sue's Fantasy Club (also in Nevada), is looking not for the mark of degradation but for signs of life. In the bedroom of a prostitute called Dee he notices on the bookshelf "literary novels by Isabel Allende, James Carroll, two books about Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, including her memoir 'Personal History."' For all the jaunty lowbrow-ness advertised by its title, "The Call of the Weird" is an artful piece of work, and Theroux's just-so placement of this image carries us deep into the scene. Dee is a fifty-ish mother of two, and the presence of Graham's memoir on her shelf alludes gently to the weight of her past, to the never-to-be-written book of her own, no less interesting, personal history.

Theroux is Anglo-American (his father is the writer Paul Theroux), a former presenter on Michael Moore's "TV Nation," and star of the British television show "Weird Weekends." "The Call of the Weird" sees him successfully translating his droll, long-bodied, apparently ego-less television persona into prose. As an interviewer, his one-two punch of English diffidence and American boldness seems to be lethal: people tell him things. Sipping cognac in a booming club with pimp/rapper Mello T, in Jackson, Miss., he is surprised when the bejeweled hustler confides, "This life is boring to me. I want your life, man." Theroux assures Mello that he went to bed the previous night at eleven thirty and did a crossword puzzle. "I would love to go to bed at eleven thirty and do a crossword puzzle, man," responds Mello wistfully. "I would love that."

The Borat tour of America -- the troll around its fleshpots and flashpoints -- is permanently available to European writers. It ignores most of the ordinary facts of life (as Keillor complained of Levy's book, "In more than 300 pages no one tells a joke"), but it's not going away: The country throws itself open with a kind of unguarded delight to even the most half-hearted probing, displaying treasures, essences, sadness, lunacy in abundance. "The Call of the Weird" suggests that, faced with such generosity, the literary interloper should keep his head, use his eyes, and talk small. To do otherwise looks a little like bad manners.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com