Not the Francophile’s France

WHEN Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, “Extension du Domaine de la Lutte,” came out nine years ago in France, it was a fresh blast of rank air, a sour little tale about a computer programmer sent to the provinces -- always a source of derision in France, those provinces. It was a nasty book that raged against the prison of consumer goods and the pettiness of French life, full of Franglais marketing slogans and brand names, written in a style that veered between the neutered locutions of French business life and snarling disgust. The book is horrible yet funny. In the measured tones of a civil servant in thrall to applied sociology and received ideas, Houellebecq expressed dirty-minded self-interest and shockingly casual racism; in short, he wrote what everyone in France was really thinking.

Most French books written in the last 50 years rely on melancholy as the only possible reaction to the modern world and have the effect of wan puffs of condensation produced by people blowing listlessly into a fog bank. In his next two novels, Houellebecq moved beyond the reiteration of the nausea first described by Sartre (most of all in “La Nausee”) and into plot, an area considered a little commercial in France.

His second book, “The Elementary Particles,” created a furor in 1998 and made him famous and rich enough to have to move to Ireland. It is an ambitious novel of ideas that draws on quantum physics and biology to describe a world so dehumanized that the only possible contact is sexual, of the kind found at orgies and sex clubs. Upon the thesis that sexual reproduction must be transcended to attain immortal life, Houellebecq built the story of two brothers: Michel, a scientist obsessed with mortality who eventually produces a human clone, and Bruno, a slob dedicated to sex. The writing was remarkable, the energy ferocious and a certain recklessness apparent. He set a central part of the book in a holiday resort dedicated to systematic rutting, unfortunately a real one, whose name he didn’t bother to disguise. The resort threatened a lawsuit; the name was changed in later editions.

His third novel, “Platform,” created another ruckus in France and gave rise to a second lawsuit. In the book, an Egyptian character rants against Islam. Four Muslim organizations denounced the characterization of Islam as “the stupidest religion,” which he reiterated in an interview with the magazine “Lire.” French intellectuals testified for Houellebecq in court, including novelist and critic Michel Braudeau, who said “freedom of speech is a mark of our Western civilization.” The case was dismissed.

“Platform,” published in France in June 2001, ends with the bombing of a resort in Thailand by fundamentalist Muslims. When the bomb went off in Bali in October 2002, the book was called prophetic, on a rawer and more immediate scale than, say, “Brave New World.”

Houellebecq’s world is a France flattened by marketing, where happiness can only be conceived of as sex and the only escapes are package holidays in exotic locales. The story is told in the first person by the hero, once again named Michel, a depressive civil servant who is employed at the ministry of culture putting on exhibitions of conceptual art in the (ever laughable) provinces. His father is found dead in his house near Cherbourg, wearing an “I {heart} New York” sweatshirt. After the service, which features a “Christian funeral-hymn mix,” the first thing Michel does is turn on his father’s TV -- “a thirty-two-inch Sony widescreen with surround sound and an integrated DVD player. There was an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess on TF1....”

Houellebecq’s deadpan description of a France colonized by American products and ideas is the background to what will be Michel’s great notion. Like all Houellebecq heroes, Michel only finds relief in sex: “Our genitals exist as a source of permanent, accessible pleasure. The god who created all our unhappinesses, who made us short lived, vain, and cruel, has also provided this form of meager compensation.” After the police establish that his father was murdered and arrest the North African brother of the cleaning woman who was sleeping with Michel’s father, he does the only possible thing -- takes a package holiday to Ko Phi Phi in Thailand. There, amid his pathetic fellow travelers -- Michel hates everyone, right-wingers, ugly women, lefties, ecologists -- and between erotic massages with Thai prostitutes, he meets Valerie, who works for the company that organized the trip.

Back in Paris and in bed together -- and after much discussion about the meaning of life -- they conceive the idea of resorts devoted to packaged sex tourism. Whereas the previous novel quoted Max Planck and Niels Bohr, the reference here is Auguste Comte’s course in Positive Philosophy. In France, marketing is an intellectual exercise, with fine theories on how to commodify human desire. Sex tourism exists, Michel says, because the Western libido has flagged, and anyway, the Third World needs the money.

They meet with Valerie’s boss, Jean Yves, a sweet man who doesn’t know that his wife is a dominatrix in a VIP sadomasochist club. The meeting takes place in “an atmosphere of blissful enchantment, rather strange, in the deserted building. Three thousand people worked there during the week, but on that Saturday there were just the three of us, apart from the security guards. Close by, on the forecourt of the Evry shopping center, a pair of rival gangs faced each other with Stanley knives, baseball bats, and containers of sulfuric acid. That evening the number of dead would stand at seven, among them two onlookers and a member of the riot squad. The incident would be the subject of considerable debate on national radio and television; but at that moment, we knew nothing about it. In a state of excitement that seemed slightly unreal, we set down our manifesto, our platform, for dividing up the world.”

The inner cities in France are tower blocks built in the suburbs, a reversal of the American model but a good way to preserve Paris. Americans long for the Paris of chestnut trees, fine architecture and slabs of meat as high as cliffs at the exotically ancient restaurant L’Ami Louis. The bad dog of French literature describes, with malignant intensity, a country crushed from above by marketing strategies, threatened from below by incomprehensible violence. Better than anyone, he nails lives made rigid by the passion for job security, contracted by carefully calibrated hypocrisies, relieved only by lump bequests from parsimonious parents and compulsive sex. A longing for a just society is perceptible beneath his description of the neat squalor of gourmet TV meals from the French equivalent of Wal-Mart.

The book has been translated into rather polite English, which is a pity. Only the informality of American language could convey the edge that makes Houellebecq’s writing so remarkable, and so hilarious, in French. In the original, his use of borrowed American words is as full of clumsy longing as the choice of baseball bats as weapons in a place where no one plays baseball. In the ‘90s, a minister of culture tried to ban “English words” -- he meant “American expressions” but wasn’t ready to admit it -- but he failed because they are everywhere. One of the tensions in France today springs from the fact that American words -- and therefore American ideas -- dominate not only commerce but also music, clothing and daily life. Houellebecq gives voice to the frustration and resentment of a country that has lost its identity to words like “hype” and “trash.”

This nostalgic nationalism brings him effectively in line with the far right wing, which is committed to the preservation of a noble, unsullied France. Viewed in this way, the religious, cultural and physical slurs that abound in “Platform” are more sinister than they appear if you are merely reading the book for laughs.

This crazy brilliant Frenchman, who writes from the soul of a despairing, acutely lucid bureaucrat on Viagra, reminds his countrymen of the forbidden, “sulphurous” Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who wrote what the French were thinking in the ‘30s and ‘40s -- the one whose anti-Semitic “Bagatelles pour un Massacre” can be quietly bought for about $1,000 at secondhand bookstores.

Houellbecq’s rage, however, lies deeper than politics or racism. His contempt embraces everyone, everything, and all versions of God, but he brings the same energy to his prose as did Celine, the same desire to share his dark and hopeless view. And he’s alive.