Rating: 
Summary: Misanthropist's Delight
Review: This book does what David Foster Wallace tried to do with his recent short story A Depressed Person (which is, despite the usual ponderous Wallace footnotes and other narrative quirks, a fine read nonetheless). It details a terrifying solipsism and depression. Plus, it's damn funny: the narrator, unnamed in Whatever, passes spare time writing animal stories that are highly moral (use of "m" word here not in the usual pejorative sense). Houllebecq is great at skewering so-called "sexual liberation," showing as he does the fact that liberations of that sort lead only to hierarchies -- in the case of sex, there are the haves and have-nots, the pretty and the repulsive. I can't wait for The Elementary Particles to be released in October.
Rating: 
Summary: fight the power
Review: We live in a world in which there are no more links. We're just particles. It's a simple metaphor.
-Michel Houellebecq What could be sadder than someone who understands the greatest problem of modernity but has
surrendered to it, rather than struggle against it ? The novelist Michel Houellebecq is the most
controversial and reviled Frenchman of the day--and just think what it must take to achieve that rare
distinction : the most hated man in France (actually, he's even fled now, to Ireland). He was widely
hailed on the publication of this novel, which was famously compared to The Stranger of Albert
Camus by many, including the critic Tibor Fischer, who is blurbed on the cover of the book. But
then his next novel, published here as Elementary Particles, attacked the French student
revolutionaries of 1968, indicting them for their hedonistic individualism and the exalting of the
pursuit of personal gratification, which he writes has effectively drained sex of any passion or love.
Such things simply aren't done in France; the Generation of '68, like the perpetrators of the original
French Revolution, are sacrosanct, are beyond criticism. Not content to merely rile up the intelligentsia, Houellebecq's new book, Plateforme, attacks Islam
and celebrates sexual tourism, trips to Southeast Asia for the purpose of having sex with teenage
prostitutes. The advocacy of using the Third World as a brothel upsets people for all the obvious
reasons. But his comments on Islam may earn him his own fatwa. The girlfriend of the novel's protagonist is murdered in a terrorist bombing, prompting this passage : Islam had shattered my life, and Islam was certainly something I could hate. In the days that
followed, I dedicated myself to hating Islam. Each time that I hear that a Palestinian terrorist, or a
Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman has been shot in the Gaza Strip, I shiver with
enthusiasm at the thought that there is one less Muslim Before September 11th such thoughts were truly beyond the pale, particularly in a nation, France,
which in a matter of decades will be majority Muslim. In subsequent interviews, Mr. Houellebecq, possibly quite accurately, suggested that Islam is doomed
because capitalism is undermining it. A thought which reflects greater understanding of the roots of
fundamentalist terrorism than many of his more politically correct critics, but which is likewise not to
be discussed in polite company. At any rate, in Whatever, a geeky young French computer technician, the job Houellebecq held when
he was writing it, who has not had sex in two years, is sent to Rouen with a partner, Tisserand, who is
even nerdier and a virgin to boot. The narrator resents a world in which he is unable to satisfy his
desires because : In a perfectly liberal economic system, some people accumulate considerable fortunes; others
molder in unemployment and poverty. In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have a
varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. So he tries to stoke Tisserand's own resentments enough to turn him into a serial killer (the one
murder of The Stranger apparently no longer sufficing). Houellebecq's critique of modern man's isolation from his fellows is certainly accurate. However,
once you've diagnosed the pathology you can't just surrender to it. Further cheapening sex and adding
violence to it can only degrade mankind further. Having recognized our condition, and that it is
critical, it is incumbent on all of us to restore the connections that once bound us together, to rebuild
community, rather than to retreat further into the self. Here's an excerpt from a profile of the author, by Emily Eakin, that ran in the New York Times
Magazine : Initially, Houellebecq set out to change the world. ... Houellebecq believed the book [Whatever]
would force people to reconsider the premium we place on physical beauty. 'I was certain the
novel would provoke social change,' he said. 'Now I think it was megalomania. When you go into a
club today, you see the same behaviour as six years ago. A novel won't ever change the world.' Is that really all that remains for Houellebecq, to try and get his hood waxed, and to help other
unattractive men to get it on too ? If so, isn't he part of the problem, rather than part of the solution
? When your doctor tells you that you're developing skin cancer, he doesn't recommend that you go
sit in the sun, does he ? At one point, the narrator sees a graffito that says : God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice. This smacks of the truth. A world in which an unattractive, and by all accounts extremely unpleasant,
Frenchman does not have his choice of woman, while unfortunate for him, is probably inevitable.
But a world in which we are all mere particles, colliding randomly but never connecting, is a tragedy
for all of us. The book then is most interesting as a self-portrait of a defeated victim of modernity's increasing
atomization (Atomisation was actually the British title of Elementary Particles). But, because he ends
up collaborating in the process, he is too much a willing victim for us to feel any real sympathy for
his plight. The appropriate posture towards the all too real phenomena he delineates is resistance, not
acquiescence. There is too much of Vichy in Michel Houellebecq. GRADE : C
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