France's bad boy of lit calms down (a little)

The Map and the Territory

By Michel Houellebecq

269 pages

Available at Powerbooks

These are — apparently — a few of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s favorite things: booze, cigarettes, sexual tourism, Thai prostitutes, Viagra, fake breasts (“they demonstrate in the woman a certain erotic goodwill”), John Grisham novels (a guilty pleasure), jokes about Muslims, the inevitable decline of humankind, and art.

Yes, that last one on the list seems a little strange; yet it plays a central role in The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq’s fifth novel. And no, we can’t actually say that the reigning enfant terrible of French fiction favors these things: he just writes about them a lot and seems to approve.

Houellebecq is a master provocateur and a pitiless detailer of Western civilization’s decline. Reading his most famous novel, The Elementary Particles (retitled Atomized outside of France), I almost found myself being convinced by his argument that the human race is doomed to extinction — and that this might not be such a bad thing. He preceded this novel with Platform, about sex tourism in Asia, and followed it with The Possibility of an Island, about a future of clones in which humanity is just a dim memory. A real laugh-a-minute guy, this Houellebecq.

Yet a funny thing happens in The Map and the Territory: Houellebecq lightens up a bit. He’s always had a sneering, contemptuous sense of humor, and this made his earlier books bearable, even as they detailed the most regrettable things in our midst. Houellebecq went way beyond the curmudgeon in these books, into some intestinal tract-dwelling commentator, excavating our bowels with words. He made the character in Notes From Underground seem as chipper as Jay Leno in comparison.

Here, he follows the career of artist Jed Martin, who begins his artistic life by photographing mechanical objects in precise, hyperreal detail (catalogue makers tend to hire him a lot); he moves on to photographing French Michelin Road Maps in obsessive close-up: he feels the maps of France’s countryside say something more real about the world than the actual topography does.

The map photos are a hit and Martin is encouraged to switch to portrait painting: his first series is about work, and takes him years to complete, detailing both professions that face extinction in the West (bar owners and ironsmiths) and larger-than-life celebrities (he pairs Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in one portrait, while another is titled “Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market”).

Martin is like a lot of Houellebecq’s main characters: male, clueless, yet somehow always plodding down the path to fame or notoriety. They’re natural targets to play off the modern world’s complexities and anxieties: they’re befuddled and not particularly warm at the center, a perfect condition to get them through the Ice Age certain to befall the West soon.

Martin’s portraits are very good indeed and sell for hundreds of millions of euros each — a commentary on the spiraling absurdity of the art market — yet he fails to reciprocate the love of Olga, a beautiful Russian woman he meets in Paris, and he lacks friendship in his life. Also, he needs someone to write the gallery notes for his first (and only) exhibition.

Enter Michel Houellebecq. An author inserting himself as a character in his own text is nothing new in these postmodern times, not even in Houellebecq’s novels which often feature a character called “Michel.” But Houellebecq has more fun than usual here, depicting himself (in case you’re not sure it’s really supposed to be him, he’s referred to in the novel as “the famous author of The Elementary Particles”) as a drunken, lonely sociopath, a sad but amusing crank who lives alone on his dead father’s provincial estate (Houellebecq, in real life, lives in Ireland, away from the French taxman and nosy neighbors).

Martin meets with the novelist at his country home and observes his eccentric outbursts (“For some time now, the famous writer had contracted this mania for using bizarre, outmoded, or frankly inappropriate words, as if they weren’t infantile neologisms worthy of Captain Haddock”); yet he’s amused enough by Houellebecq to promise him a painting.

The point of The Map and the Territory is a little less crystal-clear than other Houellebecq novels (plot has never really been his strong point, though the story veers into familiar Agatha Christie territory about two-thirds through). He still has much to say about the Western decline, taking on a variety of ailments (he notes, for instance, that in Switzerland, euthanasia services do brisker business than brothels by a mile); and it’s here, actually, where Houellebecq is so entertaining. He dissects catalogue-ese, the sort of serene prose found in travel guides (“You will need only close your eyes to remember the scents of paradise, the fountain murmuring in the white marble Turkish baths which lets one simple truth filter through: ‘Here, life is beautiful…’”) that provides the bourgeois with such a soothing balm to their capitalism. He comments on the many brands of Norwegian mineral waters on the market (“Subtle hedonists, these Norwegians… It was pleasant, though, he thought, that so many different forms of purity could exist…”) and on the fact that our modern brand attachments often lead to frustration:

“Ah yes,” Houellebecq said, handing back the owner’s manual for the Samsung ZRT-AV2. “It’s a beautiful product, a modern product that you can love. But you must know that in a year, or two at most, it will be replaced by some new product with supposedly improved features.

“We too are products,” he went on, “cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning is identical — with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state.”

Few fictionists bother to look at the connection between consumers and their products the way Houellebecq does.

And he does write about money — a lot — until you come to realize that the purpose of The Map and the Territory is really to explore the writer’s own experience of success. He has, after all, won the 2011 Prix Goncourt, a big honor in France, though he has plenty of haters there and abroad. He was taken to court last year for racial hatred (the many anti-Muslim remarks made in Platform and The Possibility of an Island did not go unnoticed) but won his case on the grounds of free speech; he’s been accused of plagiarizing passages for The Map and the Territory from Wikipedia, though he acknowledges this lifting in the English edition of the book, and clearly it’s meant as a commentary on our modern experience of text, and anyway it seems a piddling charge to lob against him.

It’s worth pondering whether Houellebecq, the character, bears much (or indeed, total) resemblance to the actual author. It’s amusing to see the author play around with the public perception of him as a misanthropic loner. It is also worth noting that, in crafting himself as a fictional character, he has introduced the funniest bit player in his own body of work yet; when Houellebecq, the character, leaves the pages somewhere around the last third of The Map and the Territory, he is actually — unaccountably — missed.