AMERICANS ARE ALONE IN THE WORLD (209 pp.)—Luigi Barzini Jr.—Random House ($2.50).
Since the war, European intellectuals have been playing a game. It is called "Analyzing America." Anyone can play, and firsthand knowledge of America is not required; in fact, too close an acquaintance with the U.S. is considered unsporting. There are no qualifications beyond a smattering of psychoanalytic vocabulary, an ability to generalize from the small to the big (e.g., the luxuriousness of American spittoons proves the wastefulness of the U.S. economy) and a limited awareness of U.S. social customs which need be no more recent than the novels of Theodore Dreiser. A typewriter and a subscription to Britain's anti-American New Statesman and Nation help.
Following in the steps of such acknowledged masters as Britain's Geoffrey Gorer and France's Jean-Paul Sartre, several still little-known but promising rookies have recently reported that U.S. children are developing prognathy ("The lower jaw is thrust forward as a result of lying for hours on the floor in front of the TV screen, chin in hand"); that, when the air conditioning breaks down anywhere, "New York reverts to terror in the face of a hostile and uncontrollable nature"; and that "the female secondary sex characteristic is the dominant theme in current American culture." Against this background of strange visions, Luigi Barzini Jr., a distinguished Italian journalist, has written a noteworthy book about a recent visit to the U.S. which is far above the usual off-the-French-cuff reporting. Even so, some of the book (a bestseller in Italy) is disturbingly close to the old analysis game. Like a cup of Italian caffe espresso, it stimulates but on occasion also sets the teeth on edge.
Jutting Conies. Newsman Barzini studied at Columbia in the 19203. worked for U.S. newspapers in the U.S.. is genuinely friendly toward America. He works with a very wide screen, and his camera cuts from Henry Ford to a Los Angeles lonely hearts club, from Ben Franklin to a skyful of paratroopers, sometimes with bewildering speed. There are the inescapable stock characters: the discontented taxi driver, the sharecropper with a washing machine who wonders whether he is really happy, the Hollywood starlet who drinks too much; and they are all forcibly made to stand for big concepts—fear, or uncertainty, or materialism—like the characters in an old morality play. The book is full of generalizations that might be fun as caricatures but are disturbing if taken seriously. Examples: the U.S. hates abstract thought; bullfighting is popular in U.S. literature because Americans are obsessed with death; most old-line tycoons drank half a quart of whisky every day. And in Newport, "in every house where I was invited [there was] a white-coated barman whom everybody called 'Fido.' "
As for the female secondary sex characteristic. Reporter Barzini agrees that it is one of the sights of the U.S. "Many [women] sport long conic breasts jutting out like tents from blouses and pullovers . . . They carry them under their chins with the same indifference with which soldiers carry their packs on the back. Strange and unreal breasts they are ... Symbolic appendages ... a fiction . . ."