 Beigbeder |  | Pick your favorite anti-French epithet, throw it at Frédéric Beigbeder, and chances are it will stick. Beigbeder is a moral dandy, a hipster nihilist, a publicity hound, a jerk, a self-impressed renegade and that most boring of all boring clichés, a celebrity intellectual bored by boring clichés. In his native France, Beigbeder is famous, and his mug, which resembles Bono's slightly adjusted by a fun-house mirror, is a recurrent image on television, where he frequently holds forth as a talking head. True to type, he is infatuated with America, or at least with Walt Whitman and his yawping breed, a group that for Beigbeder includes everyone from Holden Caulfield to Sinatra to Kurt Cobain. (As with many of our condescending European admirers, Beigbeder suffers from some grave lapses in taste. ''L.A. Woman?'' Bret Easton Ellis? Hello?) As a literary bad boy, a kind of backbench Michel Houellebecq, Beigbeder's task is to provoke the self-loathing of the French bourgeoisie. His last novel, ''99 Francs,'' was a brutal expose of a coked-up advertising industry in France -- that is, until it was published in England and became, mutatis mutandis, a brutal expose of a coked-up advertising industry in England. In short, Beigbeder is the very snapshot of a young middle-aged decadent on the make. How is it that in approaching so delicate a subject as 9/11, he has written so funny and moving a book?
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