The shorter list is of the people Houellebecq hasn't offended. Briefly a member of a left-wing literary journal, then denounced after the publication of The Elementary Particles (1998), briefly embraced by the French right-wing for his critiques of the generation of 1968, Americans, hippies, and Islam, then dropped, Houellebecq is in some ways the classic alcoholic genius: able to convince a series of people (or groups of people) to embrace him for a time, until his self-destructive anger eventually makes them realize he hates them, too. (Fortunately, some people will never meet him; hence the fan sites devoted to his work, which will take any new gesture of anger or self-destruction as further evidence of his brilliance.)

To write about Houellebecq is to write about these controversies, to write about the ways in which his characters in his third novel, Platform (2001), criticize Islam (which led to a trial in France, on charges of having provoked “racial hatred,” though he was found not guilty), his anti-Americanism, his claims about the economization of sexuality and the subsequent narrative embrace of sex tourism, his relationship to that other great French provocateur, Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

All this is well known; I am not sure how much more there is to say, how many opinions are left (genius; fascist; narcissist; nihilist; sincere; ironic). Though I will say that almost no one who writes about Houellebecq describes the fiction. Let me give you a few sentences from The Elementary Particles, which I think is an important book for you to read whether you like the sound of Houellebecq or not.

You see here one of the things about Houellebecq that makes people uncomfortable: he tends to have characters say things that would seem to contradict their own “identity” politics, making it harder to dismiss their positions as illegitimate. (This is the same move V.S. Naipaul uses to great effect in novels like Guerillas). Here, Christiane — who is likeable and important in the novel — participates in what feels like fairly standard anti-feminist degradation; from the wallet picture to the acknowledgment of her own aging inadequacy, she seems to cover exactly the sexual politics we'd expect from an unlikable male character of a certain type.

At some level, of course, it's not clear why this should bother people, since you can fairly easily return all dialogue to the mouth of the author. Nonetheless, something about the reality-effect of character operates here to make readers uncomfortable.

That feeling is aided, I should say, by the delightfully crazy interruption of scientific language that immediately follows the word “cunt.” The interruption is motivated — Christiane is a biology professor — but because in Houellebecq in general the language of science interrupts with great frequency the language of narrative the moment also feels a great deal like free indirect discourse, a crossing over of the narrator's scientifically obsessed voice with the language of the character. The rapid shift between registers of sexual vulgarity or violence, on one hand, and the language of science or sociology, on the other, is typical of Houellebecq's voice in this novel.

Later Christiane collapses while being fucked from behind by five or six men in a row in a sex club, because, as she knows and Bruno finds out, she has bone cancer (which originates, to make things perfect, in her coccyx). Following an operation, she is paralyzed below the waist, and, after Bruno fails to conceal his reluctance to care for her, she commits suicide in order to spare him the trouble. The difficulty of reading such a story, the degree to which the stakes feel set up in advance to make you uncomfortable or miserable, feels like the inevitable result of befriending an alcoholic whose major investment is to make you experience his despair, and is why Updike finds Houellebecq hateful. A recent review in New York Magazine writes that Houellebecq “has a knack for obliterating any moral queasiness associated with the ugly feelings he specializes in,” which I think is exactly wrong. But perhaps for some people...

Following Bruno's hesitation, Houellebecq gives us the following paragraph, which justifies Christiane's suicide:

Here again you see how the sociological/scientific voice of the narrator operates in relation to the progress of the narrative. Significantly, this description comes before we have any idea that Christiane will commit suicide; it thus justifies her choice in advance and shapes the reader's experience of her actions. To some extent it absolves Bruno of the crime of hesitation, though it would be unfair to say that the novel absolves Bruno of much, since he spends much of the rest of it in an asylum.

There is some very important stuff going on here, I think, in among the ugliness. I am not willing to dismiss Houellebecq, though the novel made me unhappy at times; neither am I willing to drive through however much sexual and phyisical violence it takes to chase the dream of insight. Maybe fifteen years ago, at nineteen; these days I value kindness more than revolution.

* * *

I have not mentioned at all among this Houellebecq's interest in cloning and science fiction. The Elementary Particles is in fact a science fiction novel, written from the perspective of a posthuman, alien being who is the immortal evolutionary outcome of the work in genetics of Bruno's half-brother Michel. It is framed as a love letter to the greatness of the human species that is giving way to its successor. There is more to say here, but I will wait till next time, when I will have read Houellebecq's Platform and will think about both of them — and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go — together.