Following the release of his critically and commercially disastrous film "Alexander," director Oliver Stone was arrested on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for drug possession and driving under the influence of alcohol. He had just left dinner with the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and the event could have easily appeared in the writer's own work, where middle aged professionals frequently find themselves in solipsistic, decadent free fall. Houellebecq is a literary superstar in France, where institutionalized rebellion is common and encouraged. More remarkably, he is one of the few French writers since Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to attain both international popularity and intellectual respectability, achieving best seller status in the English-speaking world without sacrificing his outre mystique.
Houellebecq is similar to his forbearers in his pessimistic view of the world, but he sheds the existentialists' academic rigor in favor of a more louche, populist sensibility. Self-conscious and cerebral, his characters are often isolated by middle class frustrations brought on by a crippling awareness of partial success. If Houellebecq has a model, it is Louis Ferdinand Céline, the author of Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), novels that also combine aphoristic observation and caustic satire. Granted the luxury of a more permissive era, Houellebecq allows his characters to voice the latent prejudices that destroyed the fascist and anti-Semitic Céline's personal reputation and made him a pariah in postwar France. Houellebecq's daring has come at a cost; he was recently been put on trial in France for publishing anti-Islamic remarks in his 2001 novel Platform. These events naturally attract libertarian sympathies, and Houellebecq emerged as a hero of the left, although he has been called, like Céline, a right wing ideologue. In the end, the attacks are undeserved; Houellebecq delights in outrageous literary effects and is less a chauvinist than an author in full control of his devices.
All four of Houllebecq's novels, Whatever (1998), The Elementary Particles (1998), Platform (2001), and The Possibility of an Island (2005), have been translated into English, in addition to a study of H.P. Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life (1991). The Lovecraft essay, with its theory that the horror writer's creative vision represents a willful negation of the world, is a good thematic primer for the novels. Houellebecq frequently blames the culture of the 1960s for its devaluation of human emotion through excess, but he often exploits the same license to questionable effect; his novels are irradiated with tiring, explicit sex scenes that fail to shock or entertain. Like Céline, he is a closet sentimentalist, wounded by life's disappointments; his characters often are redeemed by brief and improbable, erotically charged relationships fleeting enough to confirm their animus towards the world.
Houellebecq's urbane melancholy is nothing new; Wagner famously read Schopenhauer to remind him of "the secretly held belief that the world is bad." But his nerve and intellect make him one of most daring writers today, one of the few who fearlessly engages popular culture and issues. Still, Houellebecq's effusive intelligence is often more therapeutic than literary; his overwhelming presence as a cultural force, a commentator on the state of the world, threatens to eclipse his humbler role as a writer, at least in France, where the public is hungry for lofty theorists and oracles. Céline weathered his own era to achieve iconic status, and one suspects that in 200 years, worn copies of Guignol's Band will continue to line the stalls along the Seine. The works of his acolyte will endure at least half that span.
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