Saturday, December 27, 2003

Holidays in Hell

Platform by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00

Somewhere in the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, an argument breaks out among visitors to a hardcore S&M club over whether torture and humiliation are normal aspects of human sexuality. "It’s completely disgusting," says one voyeur, an artist who has gained some fame for his own revolting exhibitions. "...But it’s precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me."

Ditto the author. Like his previous novel, the 2000 The Elementary Particles, Platform is a shallow, contrary, moralistic, pornographic, and oddly powerful novel of ideas; a story of the pursuit of self-gratification that is also a sour reflection on freedom, and what amounts to a no-win battle between democracy and fundamentalism.

The protagonist, Michel Renault, presents himself as a middle-age bureaucrat with tastes and ambitions to match. A glum little man who works as an accountant for the French Ministry of Culture, his job is to finance contemporary art exhibits whose meanings elude him: "I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager," he tells us. "Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing." For all his self-effacement, Michel is not the type of fictional character who parades his unexamined life for the reader’s smug enjoyment; he’s too smart and self-conscious for that. During a vacation, he looks at himself wearing jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt: "My anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing, and I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on vacation, trying to pretend he’s young; it was pretty demoralizing." The closest he ever gets to a human relationship is his daily visit to the local porn shop (“Watching pussy in motion cleared my head”) or, if need be, hiring a prostitute.

Michel is so jaded by his admittedly passionless existence that not even the murder of his estranged father -- at the hands of the jealous Muslim brother of his father’s girlfriend -- moves him beyond an initial blast of spite. His inheritance does, however, allow him to take a vacation to Thailand, which proves something of a revelation; everyone there, like him, basically wants sex. They see the usual sights and indulge in the exotic foods, but basically they all want to connect, however briefly, with another human -- whether a call girl, a stripper, a masseur or each other. As Michel well knows, sex becomes increasingly difficult to acquire as you age; luckily for him, there’s the young and beautiful fellow tourist Valerie, who hooks up with him after the trip is over and proves to be at least as devoted to the pleasure principle as he is.

Valerie, an executive with the travel firm that arranged the trip, has what Michel can’t seem to find in anyone else: the power to give pleasure unselfishly. When she moves from her up-and-coming firm to working at a major resort industry, Michel inspires her with the idea of setting up a worldwide business based entirely on sexual tourism -- resort hotels in poor or underdeveloped countries where local prostitution is allowed to flourish. As Michel explains it, it’s pure supply and demand: wealthy westerners with everything in life but a good lay meet poor people with nothing left to sell but their bodies. For neither Michel or Valerie is profit the sole motive; they want the world to have what they have -- as well, presumably, as the sheer stamina to blow, lick, wank, fondle or bang each other on every other page. As the resort idea proliferates, it eventually thrusts both of them into the line of fire against radical religious terrorism.

Here, of course, is the nub of the problem in the modern world – a freedom-loving progressive society at war with Dark Age theocracies who are only modern in their weaponry. Echoing both Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade, Houellebecq’s novel-length suicide note suggests that the Western triumph over religious terrorism won’t be any victory at all. Chattering away at full trot as only a drunken Frenchman can, Houellebecq sees the freedom to pursue pleasure as a meaningless substitute for God -- even one you believe to be dead. Pleasure is so limited and people are so faceless as to be mere repetions of each other; any life, especially the good life, is basically just one agonizingly long dry hump. As Michel puts it, "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."

Like its predecessor, Platform arrived in this country on the heels of considerable controversy in the author’s native France. Where the earlier novel alienated both liberals and conservatives with its weird stew of reactionary politics and sexual excess, the new one was cited in a case where the author was charged with slandering Islam -- which you can apparently do in France, of all places -- in some comments he made in an interview. As could perhaps be predicted, the only thing the case achieved was to make Houellebecq a cause celebre among the international literary community.

It also, to my mind anyway, raised some question as to what Houellebecq’s aggressors were thinking. It’s easy enough to spot the scattered lines that might give offense -- "Muslims on the whole aren’t worth much," Michel says at one point -- but it’s just as easy to respond to them: Michel is frankly a racist, and he hates Islam because, at either end of the book, Muslims kill people close to him. The things he says aren’t supposed to be taken as a true reflection of the author -- or are they? Are the concerns of the fictional Michel all that different, in essence, from the author Michel – who changed his given name after his mother converted to Islam? In a stirring defense last year in the London Guardian, Salman Rushdie rightly said that a novel has a right " to be considered on its own terms … If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly." Still, it’s the kind of question you often find yourself asking with Houellebecq, who has no interest of coming down on the right, humane or conventionally correct side of anything.

Houellebecq’s nihilism isn’t the deep, rich, full-roast Nietzschean brew; it’s cranky, petulant, and so by-the-numbers bleak as to be almost quaint -- had the titles not already been taken, he could have just as well called the book Nausea, No Exit or The Fall. But despair for a world that edges ever closer to its own destruction never really goes completely out of style and Platform, like The Elementary Particles, is a book of and about its time. For all its sloppiness and pages of goopy sleaze, it has a power that’s hard to shake -- you sense a book that has its sweaty fingers on the pulse of the beast of the apocalypse. It’s easy to dislike, hard to dismiss, and impossible to put down.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri