French Ennui, Thai Sex and Three-Way

Illustration by Nancy Haver

In The Elementary Particles, Bruno — one of two fictional brothers whose lives form the basis of Michel Houellebecq’s last novel — spends a weekend working on “a racist pamphlet.” When he’s finished — (“I had a hard-on all the time I was writing it”) — Bruno takes it to Philippe Sollers in the hope that it might be published in his magazine. Sollers bursts out laughing at the absurdity of the idea. “You might have got away with it in CĂ©line’s day,” he says. “These days, there are some subjects about which you can’t just write anything you feel like.”

Houellebecq has built a formidable reputation out of ferociously refuting this claim. Condemned for his rabid anti-Semitism, Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line fled from Paris to Germany and then Denmark. Houellebecq, who lives in self-imposed seclusion in Ireland, vents a good deal of an apparently inexhaustible supply of spleen on Islam. In his new novel, Platform, he introduces a character solely for the sake of putting quotation marks around tirades against a religion that “could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do — pardon me — than bugger their camels.”

Not that Houellebecq is wary of stepping outside the security of reported speech. His narrative voice is every bit as scabrous, bitter and endearingly loathsome as CĂ©line’s. Here is CĂ©line’s narrator in Journey to the End of the Night, summoned to attend to a young woman who is bleeding horribly after an abortion but constantly distracted by her hysterical mother:  

“I myself had been so obsessed by my bad luck for so long, I was sleeping so badly that I was just drifting, I didn’t care whether one thing happened rather than another. My only thought was that if I had to listen to this screeching mother I was better off sitting than standing. It doesn’t take much to please you once you’re thoroughly resigned.”

This is precisely the attitude of Michel, the narrator of Platform, when he discovers that his father has been murdered by the Muslim brother of his young cleaner, Aicha. CĂ©line, it becomes immediately clear, is not the only antecedent Houellebecq has in his sights. The novel opens with a simple four-word sentence — “Father died last year” — that provocatively invokes the famous first words — “Maman died today” — of Camus’ The Stranger. Mersault shocks with his indifference; Michel goes one better (in the sense of worse): “‘You had kids, you fucker,’ I said spiritedly. ‘You shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ I was a bit tense, I have to admit it.” A few pages later he discovers that it wasn’t just his mother that the father had shoved his cock in; he’d been doing the cleaner too! This comes as a jolt to Michel, but, on an intellectual level at least, he is “capable of acknowledging the attractions of the Muslim vagina.”

Nothing is more characteristic of Houellebecq than the way that, having set up this psychologically loaded mise en scène, he promptly abandons it. The brother is arrested and Michel books a package tour to Thailand. Thereafter, the murder might as well never have happened. It’s not even that his father’s death convulsed Michel into melancholy resignation; he had already abandoned himself to a life of wretched self-absorption. Why? Because he’s called Michel and he’s the narrator of a Houellebecq novel. Such types might not be attractive, Houellebecq suggests, but they are not unrepresentative. A “decadent European, conscious of [his] approaching death, and given over entirely to selfishness,” he is also — or so his fellow holiday makers conclude — “a harmless human being and moderately amusing. They were right. That was about it.”

In this light he resembles a Gallic Philip Larkin, who, in his great poem “Aubade,” had this to say about death: “Most things may never happen: this one will.” Houellebecq offers an alternative angle on the same sentiment: “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.” On one matter, though, they disagree profoundly. Larkin could not see the point in buying a woman dinner in the hope of sex when you could stay home, jerk off, and save yourself money and time. Michel is only too happy to pay for sex. It’s actually the main reason he chooses Thailand for his vacation.

This trip provides ample opportunity to wind up fellow travelers who are outraged by sex tourists like himself. Up until this point there has perhaps been an adolescent, Ă©pater les parents quality about Houellebecq’s incessant determination to provoke. Among his tour party, however, is Robert, whose “formidable ability to infuriate” exceeds even Michel’s. “My fate was similar to his, and we had shared the same defeat,” Michel concedes, but Robert is further down on the road of debauched despair. “In the absence of love,” Michel concedes, “nothing can be sanctified.” This realization has been aroused in part by one woman in the group, ValĂ©rie. She is attracted to him, but Michel is so wound up in himself that it is not until they are back in Paris that the two of them get together.