Europeans

...But where The European really manages to outdistance USA Today is in its shameless advocacy of self-satisfaction—in this case, about the approaching economic integration of Europe beginning in 1992...

...She is especially severe with the French, and has somehow managed to withstand the temptation to identify with the seductive self-justifications of Parisian discourse while still making her home within it...

...This is, I think, the necessary consequence of using the New Yorker essay form to treat of certain social developments...

...And a sorry thing it is, a monstrous crossbreed of USA Today and a company newsletter...

...Spaniards might start buying more British lamb...

...For, as we approach '92, the flood of Eurokitsch is reaching such heights here that the Europeanization of Europe is beginning to look more threatening than its Americanization...

...E on the psychological limbo L...

...But reading through it I came to see that she chose her plural title with care: this is our most definitive field-guide to European disunity...

...Americans should find it hard to reconcile themselves with Miss Kramer's portraits of disunity, bred as they are to believe that national dif-ferences arose from the state of nature through poverty, ignorance, religion, or war, and will disappear with them...

...22.95 Mark Lilla 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 foreign capitals with one change of clothes, or their newspapers rotate them quickly through the bureaus—from China, to the metropolitan desk, to Paris, to Washington—in the mistaken belief that facility, not familiarity, is the hallmark of good journalism...

...Ordinary American journalists no longer have the leisure or patience to entertain such a project...

...So they mouth the bureaucratic platitudes of affirmative action at home, but find themselves completely at sea when they use the same language to understand the exotic intrigues of the Old World...

...And she wonders whether, "if Mitterrand makes people here uncomfortable, it may be because they see in his crafty vanity an acknowledgment of their own...

...They now find it hard to imagine an ephemeral bond of national character surviving in a region grown rich, educated, secular, and finally at peace...

...The front page is dominated by a militaristic image from the recent ceremony marking the interment of Jean Monnet, the "father of Europe," in the French Pantheon...

...One can imagine compelling profiles of towns turned upside-down by the arrival and departure of factories, which has certainly happened...

...And she is also alert enough to see that although Romans are quite happy to display Pope John Paul's picture on the wall, they do not like this Polish intruder, whom they regard as "a pilgrim from the Moral Majority who has strayed, by chance, into the dolce vita and decided to blast it with righteousness...

...And sprinkled among the articles by Henry Kissinger and Peter Ustinov on the importance of European unity we find the smiling portraits of European celebrities—a company president, a soccer coach—who have decided to join the '92 team, each under the headline "They all say yes...

...The profile-essay is a marvelous vehicle for exploring the difficulties of a single French farm family, but we cannot expect it to inform us about the real costs and benefits of EEC agricultural policy...

...There is a tilt to these criticisms, however, one that is neither geographic nor ideological...

...She can, petit a petit, help us to hear the full overtones and undertones to la France in the French vocabulary, and why it is that "the ruling class of France has given its sons to the state the way Italians give sons to the Church...

...In writing of "Europeans," Miss Kramer has given us a portrait of the anti-"Europe" in which the French, Germans, Italians, English, Swiss, Hungarians, and Portuguese make their unstable home today...

...Yet these are Europeans, too, ones who do not find their home in these pages...

...Traditional villages with extended families make for interesting reading, while ambitious sons who finally have a chance to get out from under papa's thumb, to buy houses and cars, fail to hold our interest...

...But Mark Lila, a former editor of the Public Interest, lives in Paris...

...It reflects instead an occasionally misplaced identification with the "little guy" who serves as the essay's subject, a partiality that can give Miss Kramer's political and economic reflections the dreaminess that the front of her magazine has recently cultivated...

...In two-inch bold type, over a picture of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl uncomfortably holding hands, Maxwell announces that "WE HAVE A DREAM...

...One wonders, though, whether there is still an American audience for this sort of journalism...

...yet when she remains within the natural limits of the form she has chosen, when she explores national character instead of the national interest, Miss Kramer is a master...

...Assuming marginal tax rates are kept down too...

...Among the advantages is the freedom to focus on the particular—a small-town election, a minor scandal—in order to measure the exact contours and proportions of the habits and prejudices that constitute a national spirit...

...Whether she is writing about the peculiar status of Le Monde in the constellation of Parisian political-intellectual life, or the political background to the Paribas financial scandal, or the French reactions to the bombing of the Greenpeace boat in 1985, there is seldom a false note...

...Just as Europe was never really "Americanized," but simply produced a half dozen home-grown perversions of an imagined American culture, so too it will never be "Europeanized...

...The Austrians who excused Kurt Waldheim do not escape, nor do the French politicians who cut deals with Jean-Marie Le Pen's racist National Front...

...Young Parisian lawyers can be expected to hunt down jobs in Brussels after '92...

...one would have more trouble writing an interesting portrait that reflected the quite real improvements in nutrition, mobility, public health, and life expectancy that almost all Europeans have experienced since the war...

...With the possible exception of the Atlantic, the New Yorker is the only American publication that still offers its writers the conditions under which reflective and well-considered foreign reporting might be undertaken...

...To tell their story one would need to consult actuarial tables and statistics, use graphs and footnotes—none of which, I'm afraid, are on the New Yorker style sheet...

...the idea of a transnational European culture arising from these exchanges is only put forward seriously by those who have a special interest in believing it, like government arts administrators and Esperantists...

...of living in West Berlin, or the edgy propriety of Zurich, have the same authentic air...

...I am told that Europeans has been getting rave American reviews, none of which have I seen...

...She knows things...

...And she is, so far as I know, the only American writer seriously engaged in this sort of enterprise today...

...and soldiers from Hamburg and Marseille could even find themselves sitting in the same tank...

...Their networks fly them in and out of EUROPEANS Jane Kramer/Farrar Straus Giroux/561 pp...

...But it is when Miss Kramer turns to France, where she makes her home, that her "insider" reports become most valuable...

...If one has lived in the countries she writes about, her skill will seem downright uncanny, for she is able to capture features of this spirit that seemed to defy formulation...

...She knows why French prime ministers also want to be mayors...

...We Americans have become both too lazy and too pious, I fear, to appreciate the real lessons of Jane Kramer's Europeans, and will instead turn to publications like The European to find a phoney, white-bread cosmopolitanism that looks so reassuringly like our own...

...They have lost the habit of speaking intelligently about national character because they fear being called racists or hearing lectures on the moral perils of stereotyping...

...Her piece on Armando Verdiglione, for instance, a "psychoanalytic" charlatanwho bilked patients, businesses, and governments out of millions, says as much about the Italian capacity for self-deception as anything written by Luigi Barzini or Leonardo Sciascia...

...It will never happen, of course...

...Like "Mc-Paper," "McJournal" is less a work of journalism than a monument to modern computer graphics, with roughly a third of its pages covered by high-quality, four-toned photographic reproductions, and half of the back page devoted to a color-coded, state-of-the-art weather map...

...she can explain the powers of the still-medieval guild of French bailiffs...

...Finishing this collection, the reader is left with the vague impression that economic growth and anonymous institutions—governments, businesses, unions—have done nothing but betray the European towns and citizens they were meant to serve...

...Miss Kramer's understanding of Europeans does not exempt them from her criticism or, occasionally, her disgust...

...Just say no...

...She notes that "French children weep for Oliver Twist in the workhouse and for lonely David Copperfield, but they do not weep for Sydney Carton on his way to the guillotine...

...A German town's desire to keep a nearby mountain both public and green is understandable, but the decision to hand it over to NATO must surely require another, more general, sort of calculation than the one she gives here...

...Although I have read and clipped her articles faithfully for several years, I confess to some apprehension on first seeing the collection, its title, and its fulsome blurbs...

...one is tempted to cry, if only in self-defense...

...she understands the important social status of the inspecteurs de finance...

...In the first week of last December, on newsstands across the continent and in Britain, Europeans could purchase the inaugural issue of their first daily transnational newspaper, Robert Maxwell's The European...

...Miss Kramer writes portrait-essays, with all the advantages and limitations accompanying that form...

...What a relief it is, then, from the "Europe" of the admen to come upon Jane Kramer's Europeans, a selection of her New Yorker pieces published over the past decade in that magazine's "Letter from Europe" department...

...But I wonder how many American reviewers really understand it, for it makes real demands on our attention and our prejudices...

...If a century of economic integration has not succeeded in making Milanese and Siciliani into Italiani, it is not about to turn Basques and Bavarians into "Europeans...