France and the US are not exactly best friends right now. So when I learned that arguably the largest symposium of French and American writers ever assembled in the United States was meeting in Tallahassee this winter, I decided to read a well-received contemporary French novel and an American one simultaneously. I wanted to discover some essential difference between the two cultures as well as - who knows? - a possible common ground.

Every night, I read two very different books, alternating chapters as one might follow a bite of grilled fish with a forkful of potato. The French novel was "Atomised," by Michel Houellebecq, the story of two half-brothers, one a molecular biologist and the other a libertine. The real subject, though, is the fragmentation of contemporary society and the transformation of the state into a soulless technocracy. Here's a single sentence that gives a sense of Houellebecq's style and focus: "All across the surface of the globe, a weary, exhausted humanity, filled with self doubt and uncertain of its history, prepared itself as best it could to enter a new millennium."

The other novel on my night table was "The Buffalo Soldier," by American author Chris Bohjalian, which begins with the death of two small girls in a flash flood. In the aftermath, the parents, a highway patrolman and his wife, begin to heal their torn lives, but then the husband has an affair with a woman who becomes pregnant. Again, a representative sentence: "Monday afternoon he switched on his lights and his siren and pressed hard on the accelerator, savoring the fact that he was on the long straightaway just north of New Haven Junction on 7 and the snow and ice had been cleared from the road."

Now, not all French novels are sprawling epics of social transformation, and there's a lot more to American fiction than the quasi-documentary approach. But there's no getting around the fact that different cultures see things differently, and the Houellebecq and Bohjalian novels represent not only dominant trends in their two countries but also a fundamental disparity between the way French and Americans view the world.

The essential French philosopher is Descartes, whose "I think, therefore I am" defines humanity as the species that lives in its head. (Even such celebrated contemporaries as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are simply using the tools Descartes handed them.)

And the essential American philosopher is - well, there isn't one. The closest figure to Descartes in this country would be Thomas Jefferson, a statesman whose philosophical beliefs were to his actual practices as the bones are to the body: indispensable, though not the first thing you notice. A Cartesian is happy in his room - in his brain, really. A Jeffersonian is only happy in the world, enjoying life and liberty while pursuing an even greater happiness.

Indeed, our prototypical American is liable to be so here-and-now that she probably couldn't name a contemporary French writer other than Houellebecq, and that only because the latter was sued for defamation by Muslim clerics last year after he called Islam "the stupidest religion." (A Paris court cleared him of the charges.)

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