The French are just trying to understand.

America is a shark. Full of religious zealots. Who are deeply divided against themselves.

These are just a few descriptions of the United States gleaned from just-released French books devoted to deciphering and explaining the other red, white, and blue. Parisian editors are dining out on a new subgenre that includes tirades, serious academic tomes, election-timed quickies by celebrity journalists, and even a novel, Frenchy, about a Parisian living in Texas when the United States invaded Iraq.

Clotaire Rapaille is a U.S.-based, French-born marketing consultant who specializes in selling across cultures. He has advised Denmark-based Lego that Americans do not read instructions and taught French cheese-makers that Americans prefer their cheese "scientifically dead." Rapaille told me that the last French publishing boomlet had a self-critical tendency: "France is in decline, France is becoming irrelevant. This is what I saw last year." As a former psychoanalyst, he has an explanation for the new phenomenon: "It's transference. The French have transferred their psychology of decline to America, so they feel better," he said. "Now they have a mission: They are going to defend mankind against the United States."

I counted at least 17 French books published this year on the United States or relations with it, most since September. Add to that a handful of books from 2003, plus dozens of U.S. titles in translation—Kitty Kelley, Graydon Carter, and Bill Clinton are all here—and you can find entire bookstore tables devoted to decoding the country that rebaptized frites as frites de la liberté. New titles vie for attention with copies of the genre's prototype, which some would say has yet to be improved upon: Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1835 he brought news of the New World back to the old, with prescient observations like this one on local government: "The people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries."

So, just what is out there now, and what does it say?

The protagonist in Frenchy, who runs a French food store, suffers prolific insults, and a veteran urinates in his garden. Still, one of his nicer neighbors tells him that America "has nothing to do with those guys in Washington." The review in Le Figaro said the novel was "as valuable as the best courses in international relations at the most prestigious universities."

You can't beat The Shark and the Seagull, by former Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, for the author's way with metaphor. It's about the rotten state of trans-Atlantic relations. (I'll let readers guess which country is which in the book's title.) The takeaway, though, isn't clear. The shark refuses to be halted. The seagull listens. They must reconcile their values, which will save the world. Or something like that.

Some of the other new works include France Against the Empire, Empire of Chaos, The Emperor of the White House, Imperial America, The Good Fortune of Not Being American, and Democracy With an Obscene Face. The last, by Jacques Vergès, a lawyer who has volunteered to defend Saddam Hussein, is illustrated with photographs of prisoner abuse inside Abu Ghraib.

Titles notwithstanding, the new books are not all polemics. Anti-Americanism is certainly present in France, but the chattering classes are making a serious attempt to understand both the United States and the Franco-U.S. dynamic. Earnest broadcasters ask the new Americologists questions like, "Do we hate Americans because we try to imitate them?"

Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States and editor of The United States Today: Shock and Change, says there are two major explanatory fads afoot in the attempt to understand U.S. behavior: It's all about the neocons, and it's all about religion.