A bad boy’s return

PLATFORM

By Michel Houellebecq

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Knopf, $25, 255 pages

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE

French literature has had its share of bad boy poets and writers — Villon and Rabelais in centuries past and more recently Rimbaud and Celine. Now there is Michel Houellebecq whose second novel, “The Elementary Particles,” began earning its author fame and notoriety five years ago when it first appeared in French.

It has now come out in several languages. Part of the book’s fame sprang from it’s sexual explicitness. At times — and those times are frequent — “The Elementary Particles” is indistinguishable from pornography. But the novel’s notoriety also derived from its bleakness.

“The Elementary Particles” took it for granted that France’s and the West’s day had long since passed and would never come again. Humankind, the dour novelist writes in his epilogue, is a “vile, unhappy race” that is “infinitely selfish.”

Bad boy Houellebecq has been in deep trouble with bien-pensant French authorities who deplore his outspoken views on Islam which he regards as a mostly despicable religion. He has his own website (in mulitple languages: French, English, German and Italian) on whose homepage he appears with bad hair and in a black shirt, clutching that traditional prop of the French intellectual, a lit cigarette.

Mr. Houellebecq has published a new novel, “Platform,” and it is full of the same non-stop sex. Once again, it is described in great detail — the private coupling of lovers as well as visits to sex clubs where partners are multiple, to say the least. In this novelist’s world, seductions take no more than a very few seconds, if that. There is sexual prowess on an athletic, Olympian level. Shame seems almost nonexistent.

Yet if the two novels share similar attitudes when it comes to sex, they have little else in common. “The Elementary Particles” was often stunning in its mordant humor, its take-no-prisoners satire, and in the range of ideas it took up — weighty questions about the nature of individuality versus membership in a community and problems raised by current scientific thought, particularly in physics and molecular biology, to name only a few.

“Particles” was a complex novel. “Platform” is not. Its story is simple. Like Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” it opens when its main character’s reaction to the death of a parent, a father this time, rather than a mother, as in Camus’ great novel. “Platform“‘s protagonist is Michel, an unmarried middling bureaucrat who works for the Ministry of Culture.

Story Continues →