i figured it had been long enough since everyone was talking about michel houellebecq that i could read the elementary particles with an open mind, and now i’ve read it and my open-minded reaction is:
this book is stoopid.
i’m not just being an ass. my critical take on the book (not that i owe anyone a critical take on any book, not here) is that it doesn’t really merit a critical reaction. but all i’ve got to do tonight is watch the game (go cavs) so let me react anyway and you can take it how you want.
1. the prose ranges from adequate to crap.
it’s a translation, i know, but i can’t imagine this sentence (chosen only because it was the first in the first chapter after i flipped the book open just now) being any better in french:
From a moral standpoint, 1970 was marked by a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic, despite the intervention of vigilant censors.
it’s clunky, inverted, and doubly passive. none of these aspects is inherently bad, but to what effect here? the thing about the “moral standpoint” is what gets me, though. was there not a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic from an immoral or amoral standpoint? not substantial enough? are morality and the erotic linked inextricably and in inverse proportion? so inextricably that i seem dense raising the question? and what about “consumption?” is it a coincidence that houellebecq (his translator, that is) uses this word in this context in a book that could be considered a sustained, if diluted, neo-marxist critique of late-twentieth century society and sexuality despite little jabs here and there at marxism or at least communism as practiced? if not, whose “morality” are we talking about when we talk about this consumption?
if it sounds like i’m being pedantic and nitpicking, i dare you to read the book — it’s way more pedantic than i could ever be (and with less swagger) and the sentences don’t get much better (though this is far from the worst). the overall effect is of a decently educated manchild throwing ideological shit at a wall and hoping something sticks.
2. nothing’s shocking.
it’s been said by wiser men than me, many times in the same great song, so why, then, was shock this book’s major selling point? the only people i can imagine being shocked by anything in this book are the type who can say “naughty” unironically and also new yorker readers (a lot of crossover in that venn diagram, too).
oh shit, now i’m really about to get pedantic.
a lot of what has passed for shocking in literature this past, oh, two hundred years (and i know this only applies to certain regions of earth, but odds are you’re in one of them if you’re reading this), is not actually transgression but wallowing (as if the aforementioned manchild played with that shit for a while before flinging it).
misanthropy and nihilism are the best ways to “shock” people these days. pornography doesn’t shock anybody anymore, and the pornography that does shock does so not because it’s pornography but because it’s overtly misogynistic, racist, violent, etc.; and proper, as in overt, misogyny and racism, make you a crackpot, not transgressive.
misanthropy and nihilism are perfectly tenable orientations toward the world, i guess (and i’ve been accused of both, or something like them, often enough, though never by anyone who’s met me or read me well), but there’s an irony inherent in a misanthrope and/or nihilist’s attempt to communicate with the audience he or she hates and/or wants to destroy. if the author expressing the misanthropy and nihilism doesn’t demonstrate an awareness of this irony, then that author is really just taking an adolescent delight in expressing those ideas. that is, wallowing.
and i don’t see houellebecq winking.
some lives are art
3. this book is a damn mess, structurally.
seriously, it lurches forward, flashes back suddenly and without transition (or real reason), and stagnates for long periods of time. in any given chapter, hell, any given paragraph, you can find haphazard juxtapositions of screenplay-like stage directions, interior monologue, poetry (really bad poetry), and essayistic digression.
it almost seems like houellebecq managed to write a novel without ever having read a novel, or maybe heard of one, and never even seen a decent movie. except that would have the potential to be awesome.
eh, he had a fifty-fifty shot and failed.
i’m messing around a little, but i actually think that’s what houellebecq was going for when you consider the narrative trope, which you would call a “trick ending” if this novel wasn’t so literary and important. see, this novel is narrated by a race of post-humans created by the cleverly named “michel,” one of the two main characters, as a way of documenting a long-forgotten and regrettable past, because these post-humans are a more peaceful and less degenerate race.
the problem is, the novel is full of bile — too much for such a content people and too gleefully (in its own faux-deadpan way) — and also these post-humans rely really heavily on already outdated ideas. i haven’t even gotten into the weakass freudian mommy and daddy stuff, and won’t. these enlightened futurefolk are not very good at writing novels or at being enlightened.
it’s conceivable that that’s what houellebecq meant us to take from it — that our successors won’t be any better than us. but as with the misanthropy issue i mentioned above, he doesn’t wink at us (aside, maybe, from a typically clunky digression on brave new world).
i will tell you a thing, houellebecq: if you did want us to believe that post-humans would be no more enlightened than us, you would have made this novel more polished. people with something to hide from themselves work much harder to hide it.
after all this, i can also say i kind of enjoyed reading the book. it was kind of like trashy science fiction without all that science. houellebecq is particularly bad at writing about science. but it was also like a trashy sf novel in the way he injects all that random, reactionary philosophy.
end of the first overtime. looks like the cavs are going to lose.
you totally beat me to writing up a post about why this book is overrated and mostly lame. dang. you did it better anyway.