The Insolence of Michel Houellebecq

“No dinner party is possible without a discussion of Houellebecqism,” reported Adam Gopnik in a 1998 Paris Journal article about the sensation caused in France by the publication of “Les Particules Élémentaires,” the second novel by Michel Houellebecq (whose latest book, “The Map and the Territory,” is reviewed by James Wood in this week’s issue.) Gopnik outlined the reasons for the scandal:

A thesis leads this novel by the nose, and the thesis, still startling France, is that the libertarian advances of the post-’68 generations have led to a sinkhole of violence and despair: that materialism and sexual liberation end inevitably in misery, violence, and hopelessness… It is violently anti-individualist and anti-rationalist … and the only way out it offers lies in the possibility of taking a grimly stoical satisfaction in a scientific apocalypse that will put an end to humanity itself.

At the time of Gopnik’s writing, the book had sold two hundred and thirty thousand copies in France in less than six months, and won the Prix Novembre “after being ostentatiously snubbed for the Goncourt.” One of the judges on the panel that awarded the Prix Novembre to Houellebecq was Julian Barnes, who, in a review of Houellebecq’s third novel, “Platform,” in 2003, recalled the machinations both before and after the prize-giving. During deliberations, another judge, Mario Vargas Llosa, described Houellebecq’s book as “insolent.”

He meant it, naturally, as a term of praise. There are certain books—sardonic and acutely pessimistic—that 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….

Houellebecq squeaked it by a single vote.

Barnes writes that “the literary world is one of the easiest in which to acquire a bad-boy reputation,” and goes on to cite the parties on whom Houellebecq heaps contempt in “Platform”:

Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham; Jacques Chirac … package tourists; France; … 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…

Despite this audacious effrontery, the book, Barnes observes, is not as successful in its provocations as its predecessor, and leaves the reader with “the sense of Houellebecq’s being a clever man who is a less than a clever novelist.”

Three years later, John Updike echoed this assessment in reviewing “The Possibility of an Island,” Houellebecq’s “lengthy exercise in science fiction”:

It is to Houellebecq’s discredit, or at least to his novel’s disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts the readers can care about.

Updike much preferred the author’s first novel, “Whatever,” which he compared to Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” and Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City”: “A recognizable everyday reality exists in ‘Whatever,’ which is populated by characters who are not all either odious dolts or slavish sex toys.” In the world of Michel Houellebecq’s later novels, such an idea would be insolent indeed.

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Photograph by Dominique Charriau/WireImage.