In 1998 I was one of the judges for the Prix Novembre in Paris: a prize given, as its month implies, late in the literary season. After the Goncourt had got it wrong, and after the stumblebum efforts by other prizes to correct Goncourt’s errors, the Prix Novembre would issue its final, authoritative verdict on the year. It was unusual for a French prize in having a (slowly) rotating jury, foreign judges—Mario Vargas Llosa was also there—and serious money attached: about $30,000 to the winner.
That year the major prizes had all failed to honour Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires, and for months le cas Houellebecq had been simmering. School teachers had protested at the book’s explicit sexuality; the author had been expelled from his own literary-philosophical group for intellectual heresy. Nor was it just the book that provoked; the guy himself did too. One female member of our jury declared that she had admired the novel until she watched its author on television. The Maecenas of the prize, a businessman whose interventions the previous year had been very low-key, made a lengthy and impassioned attack on Houellebecq. He seemed, at the very least, to be indicating where he didn’t want his money to go.
In the course of a rather tense discussion, it was Vargas Llosa who came up with the best description of Les Particules élémentaires: “insolent.” He meant it, naturally, as a term of praise. There are certain books—sardonic and acutely pessimistic—which systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous. Voltaire’s Candide might be taken as the perfect example of literary insolence. In a different way, La Roche- foucauld is deeply insolent; so is Beckett, bleakly, and Roth, exuberantly. The book of insolence finds its targets in such concepts as a purposeful God, a benevolent and orderly universe, human altruism, the existence of free will.
Houellebecq’s novel—his second—was very French in its mixture of intellectuality and eroticism; it was reminiscent of Tournier in the evident pride it took in its own theoretical bone structure. It also had its faults: a certain heavy-handedness, and a tendency for the characters to make speeches rather than utter dialogue. But in its high ambition and intransigence, it was clearly superior to the other immediate contender for the prize, a novel which was very French in a different way: elegant, controlled and old-fashioned—or, rather, “classique,” as I learned to say in judges’ jargon.
Houellebecq squeaked it by a single vote. Afterwards I was talking to the president of the jury, writer and journalist Daniel Schneidermann, about the fuss our winner had kicked up in the press and on television. Perhaps, I suggested, it was just that he wasn’t médiatique—mediagenic. “On the contrary,” replied Schneidermann (who had voted for Houellebecq), “he’s médiatique by being anti-médiatique. It’s very clever.” An hour or so later, in a gilded salon of the Hotel Bristol, before literary Paris’s smartest, a shabby figure in a baggy sweater and rumpled scarlet jeans took his cheque and—in the spirit of his novel—declined to wallow in bourgeois expressions of pleasure or gratitude. Not all were charmed. “It’s an insult to the members of the jury,” one French publisher whispered to me, “for him to accept the prize without having washed or gone to the dry-cleaner’s.”
Our Maecenas also got huffy, and announced the following year that the Prix Novembre would be suspended for twelve months, so that we could discuss its future direction. Most jury members thought that this was unnecessary, not to say insolent; we decamped to a new sponsor and renamed ourselves the Prix Décembre. Meanwhile, the novel was translated into English as Atomised, and anglophones became aware of what Schneidermann had told me: its author was médiatique by being anti-médiatique. The literary world is one of the easiest in which to acquire a bad-boy reputation; and Houellebecq duly obliged. When the (female) profiler from the Observer visited him, he got catatonically drunk, collapsed face down into his dinner, and told her he’d only answer further questions if she slept with him. Houellebecq’s wife was also enlisted, posing for the photographer in her underwear and offering a loyal quote of treasurable quality. “Michel’s not depressed,” she told the interviewer. “It’s the world that’s depressing.”
The literary world is one of the easiest in which to acquire a bad-boy reputation; and Houellebecq duly obliged.
If Houellebecq is, on the evidence of Atomised, the most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier (and the wait has been long, and therefore overpraise understandable), his third novel, Platform, opens with a nod in an earlier direction. No French writer would begin a novel “Father died last year” without specifically invoking Camus’ The Outsider. Houellebecq’s narrator is called Renault, perhaps hinting that such a man has become a mere cog in a mechanised society; but the name also chimes with Meursault, Camus’ narrator. And for a clincher: Renault’s father has been sleeping with his North African cleaner, Aïcha, whose brother beats the old man to death. When the son is brought face to face with his father’s murderer, he reflects: “If I had a gun, I would have shot without a second thought. Killing that little shit . . . seemed to me a morally neutral act.” Cut to Meursault’s gunning-down of the Arab on the beach in Algiers, and to his similar moral indifference to the act.
But in the sixty years that lie between The Outsider and Platform, alienation and anomie have moved on. So have expressions of disrespect for the parent. As a schoolboy in the 1960s, I found Meursault’s transgressive opening words—”Mother died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know”—registering like a slap (and I wasn’t a pious son either). Nowadays, you have to slap harder:
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most out of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker,’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock into my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.
Houellebecq ups the ante; but it’s also his trademark to follow the coffinside vituperation with the wry “Well, I was a bit tense.” Atomised was hard to summarise (it’s about the third “metaphysical mutation” of the last two thousand years, that of molecular biology, which will see cloning put an end to the fear of death and the miseries of genetic individualism...) without making it sound heavy; on the page, there was a satirical glee to its denunciations, drollery in the dystopia.
Platform begins very much in the mode of Atomised, with a radically detached male narrator, a child of the information age, excoriating the falseness of the world. He boasts the “disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager” towards almost everything. He is emotionally mute; socially too, and thus barely able to converse with Aïcha. When she begins criticising Islam, he more or less agrees, though he isn’t entirely hard-line about it: “Intellectually, I could manage to feel a certain attraction to Muslim vaginas.”
Anyone not yet offended? But Houellebecq, or rather “Michel” as his narrator is elidingly called, has barely started. Snorting contempt is coming the way of the following: Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham; Jacques Chirac; the Guide du Routard (a French equivalent of the Rough Guides); package tourists; France (‘a sinister country, utterly sinister and bureaucratic’); the Chinese; the ‘bunch of morons’ who ‘died for the sake of democracy’ on Omaha Beach; most men; most women; children; the unattractive; the old; the West; Muslims; the French channel TV5; Muslims again; most artists; Muslims yet again; and finally, frequently, the narrator himself.
What does Michel approve of? Peep shows, massage parlours, pornography, Thai prostitutes, alcohol, Viagra (which helps you overcome the effects of the alcohol), cigarettes, non- white women, masturbation, lesbianism, troilism, Agatha Christie, double penetration, fellatio, sex tourism and women’s underwear. You might have spotted an odd one out there. Frederick Forsyth may be a “halfwit,” while John Grisham’s books are only good for wanking into: “I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn’t matter, it wasn’t the kind of book you read twice.” But Agatha Christie receives two pages of adulation, mainly for her novel The Hollow, in which she makes clear that she understands the “sin of despair.” This is the “sin of cutting yourself off from all warm and living human contacts”; which is, of course, the sin of Michel. “It is in our relations with other people,” he remarks, “that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.” Further: “Giving up on life is the easiest thing to do”; and “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
The sin of despair is compounded when the sufferer is a hedonist. Platform is largely concerned with tourism, sex and the combination of the two. Tourism is currently the biggest single industry on the planet, a pure locus of supply and deliberately massaged demand. One key appeal for the novelist is tourism’s psychology: not least the central, Flaubertian irony whereby anticipation and remembrance (the brochure’s false promise of happiness, the holiday snap’s grinning lie) often prove more vivid and reliable than the moment itself. One key danger for the novelist—not always avoided here—is that of easy satire: tourists make soft targets not just for terrorists.
One key danger for the novelist—not always avoided here—is that of easy satire: tourists make soft targets not just for terrorists.
Houellebecq sends Michel off on a sun-and-sex vacation; his largely crass companions include the acceptable, indeed positively attractive, Valérie, who works for the travel company. Much of the immediate plot turns on her attempts and those of her colleague Jean-Yves to revive an ailing branch of the corporation they work for. This is all adequately done, though Houellebecq’s strengths and interests as a writer are not particularly those of traditional narrative. His approach to a scene, and a theme, often remind me of a joke long current in Euro circles. A British delegate to some EU committee outlines his country’s proposals, which, being British, are typically pragmatic, sensible and detailed. The French delegate reflects noddingly on them for a considerable period of time, before delivering judgement: “Well, I can see the plan will work in practice, but will it work in theory?”
Thus the primary, obvious link between sex and tourism is the carnal, interpersonal (and impersonal) one. But just as important for Houellebecq is to find the theoretical connection. Which he does: both sex and tourism exemplify the free market at its most free. Sex has always appeared capitalistic to Houellebecq. Here is his formulation from his first novel, Whatever:
In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find a bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
This kind of swift, audacious linkage is Houellebecq at his best; he loves nothing more than working over what in Atomised he called “the North American libidinal-hedonist option.” But his actual writing about sex, in Platform, is curiously both pornographic and sentimental. Pornographic in the sense of taking all its moves and images from pornography; who put what where and moved it whither until a convulsive spurt-’n’-groan; also, written like pornography of a decent, middle-ranking kind. Sentimental in that the novel’s really nice, straightforward characters are Oriental masseuses and prostitutes, who are presented without flaws, diseases, pimps, addictions or hang-ups. Pornographic and sentimental in that nothing ever goes wrong with the sexual act: pneumatic bliss is always obtained, no one ever says No or Stop or even Wait, and you just have to beckon at a non-white-skinned maid on the hotel terrace for her to pop into the room, quickly reveal she is braless, and slide seamlessly into a threesome. Houellebecq sees through everything in the world except commercial sex, which he describes—perhaps appropriately—like one who believes every word and picture of a holiday brochure.
And then there is love. “I really love women,” Michel tells us on the opening page. Later, he elaborates: “My enthusiasm for pussy” is one of “my few remaining recognisable, fully human qualities.” Despite “loving women,” Michel pointedly never refers to his mother. And when this depressed, old-at-forty sex tourist gradually finds himself becoming involved with Valérie, you wonder how Houellebecq will handle it. After all, it is a piece of literary insolence to make such a character fall in love in the first place. So how is love different for Michel from commercial sex? Happily, not too much. Valérie, though at first appearing rather dowdy and browbeaten, turns out to have wonderful breasts; she is also as good in bed as Thai prostitutes; and she doesn’t just go along with threesomes, she instigates them. She is by nature docile; yet she holds down a good job and is very well paid; like him she scorns designer clothes. And that’s about it, really. They don’t do any of that old stuff like talking about feelings, or thinking about them; they don’t go out much together, though he does take her to a wife-swap bar and an S & M club. He does a spot of cooking; she is often so tired from work that it isn’t until the next morning that she can give him a blow job. This is not so much insolent as fictionally disappointing. Oh, and Valérie has to die, of course, just when she has found happiness and the couple have decided to live on a paradise island. The set-up, and execution, of this would have been improved upon by Grisham or Forsyth.
What does Michel approve of? Peep shows, massage parlours, pornography, Thai prostitutes, alcohol, Viagra (which helps you overcome the effects of the alcohol), cigarettes, non- white women, masturbation, lesbianism, troilism...
Why, to go back to the start, does Michel hate his father so? This is one question a normally inquisitive reader might ask after that coffinside denunciation. What do we learn of this “old bastard,” this “clever cunt,” this “moron in shorts,” this “hideously representative element” of the twentieth century? That he was seventy when he died, that Aïcha was “very fond” of him, that he exercised a lot and owned a Toyota Land Cruiser. Hardly grounds enough, you might think. But we also learn, further on, that this monster had once been struck down by a sudden, inexplicable depression. “His mountaineering friends stood around awkwardly, powerless in the face of the disease. The reason he played so much sport, he once told me, was to stupefy himself, to stop himself thinking.” This is all new (we hadn’t been told before that the father was a mountaineer); and you might think, since Michel is himself depressed, that it might have been grounds for sympathy. But this is all we get, and the father swiftly disappears from the narrative, as he does from Michel’s thoughts.
Within the novel, the filial hatred is just an inexplicable given. However, book chat (not always to be despised) turns up an interview Houellebecq gave to Lire magazine a few years ago.The novelist’s parents abandoned him when he was five, leaving him in the care of a grandmother. “My father,” says Houellebecq, “developed early on a sense of excessive guilt. He once told me the strangest thing: that he devoted himself to intense physical activity so much because it stopped him thinking. He was a mountain guide.”
No reason why this strange confession shouldn’t be used by a fiction writer; but if it is to work, it needs to be supported fictionally. In Platform the slippage between “Michel R” and Michel H is more serious than this little bit of autobiographical leaching might suggest. There are problems with the narrative, officially a first-person account by Michel R, but one which dodges into the third person if it needs to tell us what only Michel H can know. (There is even an incompetent moment when Michel R gives us his judgment on a character he hasn’t yet met.) Within Michel himself, there is also some curious slippage. Thus he sets off on holiday with “two American best-sellers that I’d bought pretty much at random at the airport” (this despite feeling de haut en bas about Forsyth and Grisham); he also has the Guide du Routard. Fair enough for a sex tourist, you might think. Later, a bit surprisingly, he panics at the thought of having nothing to read. Later still, when back home, he turns out to be an assiduous reader of Auguste Comte and Milan Kundera; he also quotes confidently from Kant, Schopenhauer and social theoreticians. Is this credibly the same character, or someone shifting to meet the needs of the moment?
This sense of Houellebecq being a clever man who is a less than clever novelist obtrudes most in the novel’s dealings with Islam. Structurally, the function of what Michel calls “the absurd religion” appears to be to deliver, at the end, an extreme and murderous disapproval of the happy sex tourists. Its running presence, however, consists in a trio of outbursts. First from Aïcha, who launches unasked into a denunciation of her Mecca-stupefied father and her useless brothers: “They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.” Next there is the Egyptian once encountered by Michel in the Valley of the Kings, an immensely cultivated and intelligent genetic engineer, for whom Muslims are “the losers of the Sahara” and Islam a religion born among “filthy Bedouins” who did nothing but “bugger their camels.” Then there is the Jordanian banker met in Bangkok, who in the course of general denunciation points out that the sexual paradise promised to Islamic martyrs is much more cheaply obtainable in any hotel massage parlour. Extraordinary that three casual meetings on three different continents should turn up three vociferous Arab Islam-despisers who disappear from the narrative immediately after their work is done. This isn’t so much an author with his thumb on the scales as one clambering into the weighing pan and doing a tap dance. (Book-chat parenthesis: Houellebecq told Lire magazine that his mother had become a Muslim, adding, “I can’t bear Islam.”)
Before I started reading this novel, a French friend gave me an unexpected warning: “There’s a scene where the narrator and his girlfriend and another woman have a threesome in the hammam at the thalassotherapy centre in Dinard. Well, I’ve been there,” he went on, his tone hardening, “and it’s just not possible.” He is not a pedantic man, and his attitude surprised me. But now I quite understand it. Fictional insolence is a high-risk venture: it must, as Atomised did, take you by the ear and brain and frog-march you, convince you with the force of its rhetoric and the rigour of its despair. It should allow no time for reactions like, Hang on, that’s not true; or, Surely people aren’t that bad; or even, Actually, I’d like to think this one over. Platform, fuelled more by opinions and riffs and moments of provocation than by thorough narrative, allows such questionings to enter the reader’s head far too often. Is sex like this? Is love like this? Are Muslims like this? Is humanity like this? Is Michel depressed, or is the world depressing? Camus, who began by creating in Meursault one of the most disaffected characters in post-war fiction, ended by writing The First Man, in which ordinary lives are depicted with the richest observation and sympathy. It seems less likely that Houellebecq will ever succeed in purging the sin of despair.
