Reza Thin

Yasmina Reza's book on Sarkozy, which Éloi Laurent reviewed on this blog many months ago, has now been translated into English, and Adam Gopnik interviews Reza for the New Yorker. He doesn't get much. The book was thin gruel to begin with, but it was thickened by the immense expectation that attaches to any newly elected president, compounded in Sarkozy's case by a hint, an intimation, that whatever he had done to get himself elected was now water under the bridge; that he had been secretly preparing himself, steeling himself, for a moult into a new man equal to the position to which he had been elevated; and that Reza, who had observed him throughout the chrysalis phase, was in a unique position to sketch the butterfly that would emerge where once there had been only a creepy caterpillar.

Events have not been kind to either Sarkozy or his scribe. His transformation was short-lived. Reza's text proved more enigmatic than revelatory, an elaborate tease, rather like the tease of Sarkozy's election night promise that he would retreat to a monastery to prepare himself for the presidency in three days of rigorous ascesis. The monastery was almost immediately abandoned in favor of a yacht, however, and the tone of the new presidency was set. Gopnik, who attends to French matters only intermittently these days, seems, or pretends to be, unaware of all this.

In any case, Reza's book will surely vanish almost immediately. Whatever publisher might have imagined there would be a market for such a book in translation is probably rueing the day. Even in France it has had no staying power. It was a flash in the pan, the product of a fleeting moment that never existed in the United States. The New Yorker may think that by noticing the book it is evincing a continuing interest in France, but in fact it is demonstrating that its curiosity does not extend beyond the tinsel and glitz of second-degree celebrity. So we have Reza commenting on Bruni, just as in some other go-round we will surely have Bernard-Henri Lévy commenting on Bernard Kouchner or some such coupling. But these are the small potatoes, inexpensive enough to fill the pages of glossy magazines. When we have Luc Besson presenting a biopic of Eric Besson or Jay-Z sharing the stage with Diam's, we will know that France has truly arrived in the firmament of American media.