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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
It's been called pornographic, adolescent, racist and xenophobic, but Michel Houllebecq's "Platform" is a brilliant study of the sexual condition of the Western world.
Aug 2, 2003 | I stopped reading Michel Houellebecq's last novel, "The Elementary Particles," right around the scene where the narrator bashes in the head of a cat after the animal has watched him masturbating. By then, I felt I'd been watching Houellebecq masturbate for pages, and I escaped while my own noggin was still intact. If you wanted to parody French nihilism, and blase contempt for everyone and everything, you couldn't improve on "The Elementary Particles." It was one of those books where the author is so determined to shock and offend, that boredom seemed the only rational response.
I haven't changed my mind on that book, but it's a bit embarrassing to admit feeling that way when so many of the reviews of Houellebecq's brilliant new novel, "Platform," are affecting just that pose. "Even if his position is just a posture," wrote Toby Clements in the British paper the Telegraph, "it is at least an amusing one." Amusing ... the perfect adjective to use when we don't want to give too much credence to a book's ideas, when we want to say that we may be entertained but, ho, ho, we're not taken in. The British are particularly adept at this, and most of the U.K. reviews of "Platform" (with some notable exceptions, like Anita Brookner, who said that by comparison English novels fall "by the wayside") follow suit. In the Guardian, novelist James Buchan goes out of his way to show he's not swayed by Houellebecq's "bar-room opinions." "He reads like an adolescent," writes Buchan, "alternately timid and aggressive, solemn, hormonal, posturing, helpless." On BBC News Online, Alex Webb rather sniffily talks about "the unattractiveness of [Houellebecq's] views," which admits distaste while carefully avoiding any discussion of their substance. Even the good reviews seem embarrassed to be praising the book. In the New York Times Book Review, Jenny Turner of the London Review of Books gives "Platform" a positive review while managing to discount every one of its central ideas as "naive ... embarrassingly infantile ... reactionary ... xenophobic."
So let's get it out of the way -- Houellebecq is impolite, strident, sometimes showily cruel, and determined to offend. "Repetitive, one-sided, subtle as a jackhammer," Michael Harris wrote in an admiring review of "The Elementary Particles" in the Los Angeles Times, and he's not wrong. There are moments in "Platform" as well where you wish some editor had told Houellebecq that he simply didn't have to work so hard to jolt us. He has to tell us that an old man who dies from a blow to the head has his brains spill over a concrete floor. When one character escapes death after being gang-raped, Houellebecq makes sure to include a description of the rapists' usual method of killing their victims. A business meeting in an office complex sealed off from the dangerous neighborhood outside coincides with the murder of an old lady by a street gang. The narrator masturbates at a peep show while he imagines the fat, stupid (his description) intern who works in his office gorging chocolate cake at a patisserie. Like Houellebecq's tirades against American and British pop literature (which are nonetheless frequently hilarious), these scenes are cheap examples of "epater le bourgeoisie," and they are easy to discount.
The rest of "Platform" is not so easily discounted. Some critics have said that Houellebecq has written a novel of ideas -- a reliable way to scare off potential readers if ever there was one. What he has written is a novel of provocations -- sexual, cultural, political, racial. And even if you find half of them too simple, even when the philosophizing and theorizing that attend them grow tiresome, they have a hard rational core that demands they at least be grappled with. (It doesn't hurt that "Platform," written in a casual, conversational style, reads like a shot.)
Houellebecq opens with a deliberate echo of the opening of Camus's "The Stranger" ("Maman died today"): "Father died today." The narrator, like the author, is named Michel. He's a 40-something civil servant, working in a government bureau that funds cultural events. A loner, alienated but not dead to the world, he is almost comically typical of French heroes, unable to feel passion in his work or his life. He takes care of his sexual urges at peep shows or in unsatisfying encounters with prostitutes. The death of his father affords him a sudden financial windfall and he rouses himself from his lethargy to embark on a tour of Bangkok. There he meets Valérie, whom he's attracted to but whom he does not take up with until after the tour, when they are both back in Paris.
It seems especially hard for Houellebecq's critics to credit him with writing a love story, but nonetheless that's what the relationship between Michel and Valérie is. The primary objection seems to be that the relationship is based on the couple's sexual chemistry, and some critics have found the fact that Valérie is bisexual, adventurous and enthusiastic makes her little more than a male fantasy. There may be an element of truth to that (what straight man wouldn't want a woman like that?). But what seems foreign to Houellebecq's critics is not just the idea that a woman's sexual appetite can equal a man's (which is just the old Victorian notion of a woman's proper lack of interest in sex done up in new feminist garb), but that a relationship can sustain itself if the sex is good. If that's true for people who don't get along out of bed, why shouldn't it be true for people who do?
The critical comments on the sex scenes in "Platform" -- Alex Webb: "[the] adolescent quality to the frequent descriptions of sex in the book"; James Buchan: "the incontinent love of sexual description"; Lee Henderson in the Toronto Globe & Mail: "almost rigourously cliched sex scenes"; Toby Clements in the Telegraph: "pornographic" -- are much more revealing of the critics than of Houellebecq. They employ "pornographic" in the frequent and lazy manner used to dismiss the explicit. Webb inadvertently betrays the prejudice of the critics when he refers to the "adolescent" quality of the sex. Sex, it still seems, is the one major area of human experience considered unworthy of intellectual respect, as if we should all live entirely in our heads instead of equally in our bodies. And if we acknowledge that we have penises or vaginas that get hard or moist, we've immediately marked ourselves as unworthy of adult consideration. (How, you wonder, do these critics read Lawrence?)
Houellebecq gives the lie to these charges. For writers who are out only to shock, sex is the easiest route to the sordid. What strikes you about the sex in "Platform" is how tender it is. Michel and Valérie take pleasure in each other and enjoy giving it. Houellebecq is not coy about what that pleasure consists of. He writes about enjoying each other's smells and secretions. In the book's view, Westerners have become alienated from their own bodies, and when reviewers claim shock at lovers who enjoy the taste of their partner's vagina or sperm, or the look on their partner's face when he or she is on the brink of orgasm, they are inadvertently affirming Houellebecq's view. Even when Michel and Valérie involve other partners -- when Valérie invites a chambermaid to join them on holiday, or when they visit a swing club and spend the night having sex with an attractive couple they meet -- Houellebecq doesn't use the sex as an example of decadence or spiritual corruption. The frequency of the sex in "Platform" is true to the burst of erotic energy that accompanies the beginning of any relationship. And it's worth noting that Michel imagines he can be happy with Valérie even when their sexual life has ebbed.
