May 18, 2006
Updike on Houellebecq in the New Yorker
By the third column of this review, I thought, Of course John Updike is going to tear apart Michel Houellebecq:
Houellebecq and Hugh Hefner alike offer the ailing world a panacea of self-righteous hedonism. The twinkle in Hefner’s eye becomes a furious glare in Houellebecq’s. Their connoisseur’s emphasis on the physical perfection of the naked young women whom they present as pieces of Utopia verges on pedophilia; Daniel1 writes, “The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.” Houellebecq’s spokesmen insist that sex is not merely an aspect of life, or merely one of its pleasures: “All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything.” [ . . . ] Houellebecq’s solemnly blunt descriptions of sex acts are notorious, or as notorious as such things can be in a sex-saturated age; but it is one thing to propagandize for sex and another to integrate it, as more than “naughty bits,” into the conflict-ridden flow of incident and psychology that make up a novel.
The catch is that Updike himself offers Hef-style hedonism; it’s exactly his softcore sensibility that is turned off by the dissociated raunch Houellebecq peddles.
UPDATE, 9/1: Last night I finally read James Wood's take on the French author, subtitled "pornographic novelist Houellebecq's hidden conservatism," published in the August 28 issue of the New Republic. A few excerpts:
For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist—and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it.[ . . . ]
One can see why Houellebecq has excited such ecstatic reviews. It is exciting to encounter a vision of such furious logic, unafraid to do its angry computation on the page, bold with social and moral outrage. And Houellebecq's vengeful conservatism, though familiar in many ways—the 1960s is once again the culprit, with Charles Manson the inevitable fruit of all the enjoyable excesses—can indeed fire into brilliance. The best chapter in his best novel, The Elementary Particles, mobilizes this conservatism to argue, with unexpected power and rectitude, that Huxley's Brave New World, far from being a dystopia, is actually "our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against aging, the leisure society." And note the canny way in which Houellebecq's critique is at once left-wing and right-wing. Right-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is pinned on the degradations of the 1960s and on American self-indulgence; left-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is likened, in Marxist fashion, to the ravages of the capitalist market.
This must explain some of Houellebecq's success with young readers in a post-ideological age.