Le provocateur really has a lot of issues

WHAT would the literary landscape be without a French novelist of ideas to brood over life’s arid bits and to outrage the bourgeoisie with his ruminations?

In fact, as globalized consumerism replaces social standards with market forces, the whole notion of a philosophical bourgeoisie seems increasingly like le Reveillon or the good Sunday lunch, a quaint French tradition maintained, in this case, to provide a convenient locus for the artist provocateur’s affronts.

“The Possibility of an Island” is the much anticipated new novel by Michel Houellebecq, France’s reigning novelist of ideas, in part, because he has found a way through the vacuum created by the withering away of what we used to call “middle-class values.” The targets of his scathing meditations -- tricked up in the barest rudiments of narrative fiction -- are the indulgences, excesses, utopian delusions and pieties of what we would call the baby boomers and what the French term the Generation of ’68 in homage to their own student rebellions.

Essentially, his critique is rooted in the nihilist right and delivered with the inflections of neo-fascism and Euro-racism in a “flat-style” prose that owes something to both the writing and misanthropy of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, to whom Houellebecq frequently is compared. The one temptation of the right to which this writer seems immune is religion. He has said that all monotheistic faiths are based on “texts of hate” and that Islam is “the most imbecilic religion of them all.”

“The Possibility of an Island” is narrated by Daniel, a French comedian who has become immensely wealthy with vile “transgressive” stand-up sketches and films, and also by his clones, about whom more shortly. Daniel describes his own comedic style as “behaving like a complete bastard with impunity” and muses that, “If you attack the world with sufficient violence, in the end it will cough up its cash.” (Houellebecq has made an almost unimaginable amount of money for a serious French writer and reportedly was paid more than 1 million euros for this novel.)

One of Daniel’s films, “The Social Security Deficit,” is described thus: “The first fifteen minutes of the film consisted of the unremitting explosion of babies’ skulls under the impact of shots from a high-caliber revolver -- I had envisaged it in slow motion, then with slight accelerations -- anyway, a whole choreography of brains, in the style of John Woo.”

Houellebecq’s protagonists are either solitary or copulating -- graphically, if unerotically. Their attitude toward women is summed up in this exchange:

“Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?”

“No.”

“The woman.”

When the middle-aged Daniel’s wife, an editor, begins to put on weight and loses interest in sex, he develops an obsession with a young Spanish actress concerning whom he muses: “The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity -- which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.” He tells us that, “Like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for ... , and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal, pampered and spoiled, protected from all cares as from any difficult or painful task so as to be better able to devote herself to her exclusively sexual service.”

A send up of misogyny?

Elsewhere, the author has said that he has “always seen feminists as amiable idiots.”

Children don’t fare much better, as Daniel describes “that legitimate disgust that seizes any normal man at the sight of a baby,” which leads to a “solid conviction that a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel....”

He recalls that, “On the day of my son’s suicide I made a tomato omelet.... I had never loved that child; he was as stupid as his mother and as nasty as his father. His death was far from a catastrophe; you can live without such human beings.” Daniel, however, is fond of his dog, Fox: “The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it possible to make him happy.”

The novel’s narrative alternates between Daniel’s voice and that of his clones. Not long before his own suicide he becomes involved with a cult -- based on the real-life Raelians -- who have received their inspiration from visiting aliens and now plan to seize eternal life through cloning. Daniel24 and Daniel25 speak to the reader from 2,000 years in the future when similarly cloned “neohumans” live forever in fortified enclaves surrounded by the desolation of global warming and war between Europe and the Arab world. (Oh yeah, Fox gets cloned into immortality too.)

It’s all rather preposterous, but, in a good novel of ideas, after all, narrative is just an armature on which to hang aphorism.

When it comes to the literature of provocation and, by now, it should be clear that this is the genre to which Houellebecq belongs, everything turns on motive. And if you go to the author’s biography, there’s a great deal to suggest that his fictions have a lot to do with settling life’s scores. In France, he has spawned what is virtually a cottage industry of interpretation, including an unauthorized biography, “Houellebecq non autorise: enquete sur un phenomene” by Denis Demonpion, who writes for the newsweekly Le Point. Demonpion discovered that Houellebecq had drawn savage portraits of former colleagues from the period he spent as an IT technician for the French Ministry of Agriculture, down to the point of appropriating their actual names.

His real bile, however, has been reserved for his parents, both of whom Demonpion interviewed at length. His mother is a doctor and his father a sometime truck driver and ski instructor, who were confirmed counterculturalists -- hippies, we’d call them -- and decided that caring for their son was intrusive and abandoned him at the age of 5 months to the care of first one grandmother, then another. His father told Demonpion that, quite early in life, Michel “was conscious of the futility of existence, of the difficulty of living.” His mother described her son as “mentally gifted, emotionally subnormal.”

On his website -- of course he has one -- Houellebecq characterized the writing of “The Possibility of an Island” as “a period of almost constant pain. Never had I felt to what point writing a novel is a solitary and punishing activity; in fact I believe it’s the saddest activity in the world.” Earlier, in describing his parents, he wrote there: “Until my death, I will remain an abandoned child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.”

At this end of this new novel, Houellebecq sends the last Daniel on a kind post-apocalyptic odyssey that ends in what the author seems to intend as an affirmation of real life, bleak though it may be, as opposed to a utopian eternity. Pondering the choice, a reader is drawn back to the character -- and the writer -- who proffers it.

It is a mark of Houellebecq’s difficulties as a writer that the reader who follows him to this point can’t quite decide whether to reach down and take the abandoned authorial child in his arms -- or reach for one of those high-caliber revolvers.

*

The Possibility of an Island

A Novel

Michel Houellebecq

Translated from the French by Gavin Bowd

Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pp., $24.95