Recognisably Houellebecq

Jacques Testard

Tuesday, 22nd November 2011

Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English.
 
In this latest offering by French literature’s preeminent provocateur, we follow the career of Jed Martin, a successful artist with no ambition to be one. Struggling to make sense of his growing fame after breaking up with ‘one of the five most beautiful women in Paris’, a leggy Russian blonde named Olga, Martin befriends the novelist Michel Houellebecq — a depressed, decrepit, misogynist drunk with a penchant for cured meats and consumerism who lives in seclusion in Ireland. Houellebecq writes about Martin’s forthcoming show; the artist paints the writer. But the plot takes a typically brutal turn when Houellebecq’s fictional alter-ego is gruesomely murdered, his body shredded with a laser, his bones piled up in the chimney of his childhood home in rural France. ‘Houellebecq had lots of enemies’, writes the real-life author.
 
As in previous novels, ideas are prevalent in The Map and the Territory. Digressions on these ideas, often set up as dialogues between characters to lessen the intervention of an otherwise (mostly) omniscient narrator, are frequent. There is less on sex and women than previously, and, alongside the relatively new fields of art, architecture and social theory, recurring Houellebecqian themes such as death and consumerism are given ample treatment. One such dialogue brings the character Houellebecq to tears full of pathos when he remembers the brief existence of his favourite Camel Legend parka: ‘“No doubt the most beautiful parka ever made, it will have lived for only one season…” He slowly began to cry, big tears streaming down his face, and served himself another glass of wine.’
 
Yet Houellebecq’s habitual nausea and communicative sense of depression at the human condition are tempered in The Map and the Territory by an acute sense of irony and playful foray into the meta-fictional and the post-modern. The character Houellebecq allows its creator to parody himself with a beguiling ambiguity. Does the real Houellebecq — reaching mischievous heights here — not also spend each summer in Thailand, where prostitutes still ‘suck without a condom’?
 
First-time Houellebecq readers may find such allusions distasteful, but can rest assured that this is Houellebecq’s funniest and least provocative novel since Atomised. Managing to hinge the plot around the appearance of his fictional self allows the self-styled ‘writer of Platform’ to veer into the satirical trope and fight his corner against his very real critics within the French establishment. Unfortunately, English readers with no prior knowledge of French pop culture will miss out on several self-referential in-jokes (Beigbeder’s breakdown when he meets Jed for the first time; Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s coming out — to name two particularly effective instances). Other critics have pointed out the perennial issues with Houellebecq’s work — the lack of female characters, or the lack of characters at all, for that matter. These are valid points, and readers in search of a lengthier discussion of this book’s flaws are advised to read Benjamin Kunkel in the London Review of Books.

Few writers in activity can be said to have a recognisable style of writing. Houellebecq is one of them. Ever since the publication of Whatever in 1994, he has been operating within a specifically-constructed language of modernity — or, one might argue, a language of banality. His prose is pared-down, often simple, effectively employing the language of the every day, brands and all — a powerful tool to serve an often powerful critique of contemporary society.

Yet here, for the first time, the nausea is softened, the anger diluted: Houellebecq is clearly enjoying himself. The Map and the Territory is eminently readable and for it to reach the bedside tables of Middle England would undoubtedly be A Good Thing. Flirting with the borders of what Stella Rimington and consorts might have called ‘the realm of the readable’, The Map and the Territory is nonetheless firmly entrenched in the ‘land of the literary’.

Jacques Testard is founder and editor of The White Review.

Blog Tags: Fiction , France , Languages , Literature , Man Booker Prize , Sex