What the French love about America

This suburb of Paris recently hosted a remarkable discussion about whether the world still believes in the American dream.

The panel consisted of nine U.S. authors representing a spectrum of ages, literary styles and cultural backgrounds. The audience that filled the auditorium was French. The debate was part of Festival America, a three-day extravaganza devoted to North American literature.

Many panelists asserted that the image of America has darkened because of the war in Iraq. They trashed the Bush administration’s policies abroad and at home. They said Americans struggle harder than ever for the basics: a house, job security, healthcare.

Then Native American author Sherman Alexie spoke up, declaring himself proof that the dream lives. Alexie, whose latest story collection is “Ten Little Indians,” grew up in the bleak confines of the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington state. Today his books are published in 18 languages.

“I see white American writers on these stages disparaging the country, when everything they have is because of that country,” Alexie said. “The dream has not died. I am a millionaire because of my imagination. I don’t know if you could find another society that has ever existed where somebody like me could become what he has become.”

In fact, the American dream must survive in some fashion if a book festival in France, a bastion of anti-Americanism, can draw 15,000 people to celebrate 50 writers from across the ocean.

It’s the old transatlantic love-hate story. The French generally dislike U.S. politics, commercialism and individualism. They don’t think much of the cuisine, either. But they devour its cultural products. America’s literature has joined its jazz and movies in the French pantheon of obsessions.

The participants here were struck by the size of the audiences and their interest in authors’ opinions about political and social issues, according to novelist Jim Shepard, a professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. This year Shepard published the critically acclaimed “Project X,” which tracks the descent of an eighth-grader into a quintessentially American nightmare: a Columbine-style shooting plot.

“It’s so clear that in Europe there’s a different appreciation of the writer,” Shepard said. “They’ll say: ‘We’re having a panel discussion about an international crisis; let’s ask a poet.’ It’s hard to imagine anyone asking me to go on TV in the States to talk about school shootings. They’d talk to a psychologist, a principal, maybe a cop. But a novelist? They’d say: ‘But he wrote made-up stuff.’ ”

The organizers of the biannual festival call it the biggest of its kind outside the United States.

Marquee names included Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon and Sandra Cisneros. The roster ran the gamut: from the Afro-Caribbean voices of Jamaica Kincaid to the Cuban American experience of Ana Menendez, from the Deep South of Allan Gurganus to the Pennsylvania coal country of Tawni O’Dell.

Vast and varied landscape

The appeal of American literature grows partly from its commitment to social realism, according to French book critics, who think that some of their native writers have strayed into excessive introspection.

“The wave of enthusiasm for American literature comes no doubt from the fact that it’s capable of keeping a promise,” editor Emmanuelle Heurtebize said in a recent article in Elle magazine. “The reader who buys an American novel knows that they will be transported by a real story, with characters anchored in a contemporary reality.”

Geographic and cultural vastness makes the United States a perpetual cultural frontier, according to the festival’s creator, Francis Geffard. In addition to working as an editor for the Albin Michel publishing house, he owns Millepages, the biggest bookstore in Vincennes, a middle-class community of 43,000 on Paris’ industrial eastern edge.

Geffard’s fascination with North American writing drove him to persuade the city hall to sponsor the first Festival America in 2002. The turnout was impressive and the festival has continued ever since. Geffard is enthused by the range of American writing.

“French readers must get out of New York -- they have to read the Hispanic Americans, the blacks and the Indians,” Geffard told L’Humanite newspaper. “They will discover an original, ample literature without complexes, often intensely crafted, without affectation. There are immense reading territories to explore.”

The public here clearly relished watching U.S. intellectuals in action. At a panel titled “Analysis of a Society: America Through All Its Characters,” the discussion focused initially on narrative techniques, particularly the first-person voice.

The omniscient narrator of yore seems unsuited to today’s fractured times, several authors said. Michael Cunningham said he chose the device of multiple voices in “The Hours” -- which became an Oscar-winning film with Nicole Kidman -- for that reason. Literature is undergoing headlong change, he said.

“I think we’re seeing the end of universality,” Cunningham said. “The end of a notion of a small body of great books that are supposed to speak to everybody. I think we are saying goodbye to that one for the first time in history.... A book that speaks to a 65-year-old white guy may actually have nothing to say to a 23-year-old Jamaican woman. Or vice versa.”

The discussion eventually veered from books to politics, with the approaching U.S. presidential election dominating many panels. The authors gave a vivid portrait of the political mood at home, but it was one-sided because they seemed as unanimously anti-Bush as their listeners.

Politics aside, it is the role of writers to stand apart and look at their society with a critical eye. The idea of an American dream endures because it has a simultaneously hopeful and scary power, said Danzy Senna, a 33-year-old Bostonian whose fiction explores frontiers of race and identity.

“Part of the American dream is about reinventing yourself,” she said. “And I think that there’s something powerful and alluring about that idea, and something really terrifying about that lack of a fixed identity. Sort of endless possibility and sort of spiritual homelessness. That’s why I think of L.A., actually, as the quintessential American city.”