(Vintage, £7.99 stg, P/B)
The latest novel from the author of controversial and prize-winning works
Atomised and Platform is his most normal and conventional outing thus far. But
this is Houellebecq, so it is still relatively challenging.
Essentially it is the life-story
of successful French artist Jed Martin, an only child and a solitary adult,
whose social and sexual interactions are few and far between. He meets his
retired architect father once a year for Christmas dinner (his mother committed
suicide when he was a boy). For a time he has an affair with beautiful Russian
émigré, Olga. Otherwise his main distraction is the fluctuating state of the
boiler in his bachelor pad/artist’s studio. He seems to stumble through life,
having the great good fortune that his talent is recognised, and handsomely
remunerated, without much obvious self-promotion. Indeed, his Kiplingesque
indifference to ‘those two imposters’, and the feeling that his acclaim is as
much the result of blind chance as it is of ability and application, is one of
his more attractive features.
He begins his artistic career
photographing tools and household objects, but gains attention for his series
of photographic recastings of Michelin maps. It is through these works that he
meets Olga, who is Public Relations director of Michelin France. After they
become lovers, they enjoy weekends away in provincial France, at ‘Charm &
Relax’ hotels and Michelin starred restaurants. One could argue that in his
caustic observations on the socio-economic demographics of the domestic leisure
industry, Houellebecq here does for tourism in France what Platform did for holidays in Thailand. Jed’s mature work, carried
out long after Olga has returned to promotion in Moscow, starts out as the Series of Simple Professions, and
culminates in canvases with titles like Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the
Art Market. He photographs things; he paints people.
The Michelin fixation has a clear
antecedent in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Blue Guide’ from Mythologies; but it is another, more well-known Barthes work which
really informs The Map and the Territory:
‘The Death of the Author’. Jed requests that none other than Michel
Houellebecq, the notorious novelist, write the catalogue essay for a
retrospective of his work. After meeting the author, he decides to do a
portrait of Michel Houellebecq, Writer.
So, Houellebecq becomes a character in his own novel, with all the
opportunities for satire, self-parody and doubleness that entails. When the
author gets bumped off in gruesome fashion, the book takes an unexpected left
turn into a police procedural. It also brings the nod to Barthes full circle,
and sets up a challenge from the creative to the critical, the literary to the
theoretical. Barthes argued for the effacement of authorial biography and
intention. Houellebecq’s voice, entangled as it is with his anti-celebrity, and
the flatly opinionated tone of his writings, is so powerful that it speaks from
beyond the grave.
Some will say that this is
Houellebecq’s least ambitious novel, even if it is the first one to win the
prestigious Prix Goncourt in France. Atomised,
after all, was dedicated ‘to mankind’.
But, aside from taking a few pot-shots at his detractors among France’s
media figures, for the most part Houellebecq avoids the navel-gazing pitfalls
inherent in the ‘novelist-as-character-in-his-own-novel’ ploy. Rather like the
artist Jed Martin, the writer Michel Houellebecq has achieved both critical and
commercial recognition, a combination which can arouse a good deal of professional
jealousy and financial envy. The novel does contain some shrewd send-ups of art
criticism and the art market. The character Houellebecq, in his exhibition
catalogue, opines that all of Jed Martin’s work could be subtitled A Brief History of Capitalism. Perhaps
the same is true of Houellebecq’s oeuvre. At any rate, he can still employ his
trenchant talent for amusingly sweeping generalisation to devastating effect,
as with, ‘They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the
exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a
question for them in the course of a weekend to get plastered or totally
shit-faced; it was already – but they were still young enough to laugh
about it – the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish
happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its
middle-to-upper classes in middle age.’ One certainly wonders how far his
tongue was planted in his cheek when he has Jed’s father offer this opinion of
his work: ‘He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.’
First published in The Sunday
Independent.
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