A Novel of Uncertain Ideas
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
A Novel of Uncertain Ideas Platform By Michel Houellebecq Knopf. 259 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Last YEAR critics got their dander up when...
...He feels no such ease with French women...
...Nor does the death of his father—whom a Muslim murdered, he later reveals— unleash any sorrow...
...This creates a narrative problem too...
...Still, Houellebecq's concern with the conflict between Muslim fundamentalism and capitalism is extraordinarily prescient: The book was published in France in 2001, before the attacks on New York, the Pentagon and the dance club in Bali...
...Nothing unexpected ever happens, however, and no man or woman is shown to have a sexual response that is in any way particular to them...
...That there are a lot of genitals in Platform (Asian, African, French, narrow, fat, wet, stiff, Viagra-assisted, sated, welcoming, rubber) does not make it a book full of happiness...
...If so, it doesn't work...
...Is Houellebecq endorsing or satirizing Michel's theories on race, sex, and tourism...
...Touchingly, he starts to bloom...
...He would be far better off with his needs met through the capitalist system...
...He calls her for a date and it is only minutes until they are in bed together—a brief, if climactic, experience for Michel, who declares: "I could have died for such a moment...
...One longs for Michel to get stung by a jellyfish while he and Valérie are rocking gently among the waves...
...Thus inspired, Jean-Yves and Valérie propose to revamp their company's exotic resorts, making the nonMuslim ones into "Aurore Aphrodite" bowers of bliss...
...The basic conceit of the first person narrator is that the speaker and the author are one, but a good novelist makes this more interesting by communicating the limitations of the narrator's perspective...
...The narrator is supposed to be French, but the state he is most familiar with—like the protagonist of Camus' L'Etranger, to which Platform has been generously compared—is anhedonia, where there is no pleasure to be found...
...Jean-Yves represents the perfect customer...
...Maybe he is simply at a loss about how to tell a story within the confines of his chosen approach, or how to establish distance between himself and his narrator...
...Nabokov, who hardly abstained from explicitness, gave Ada a "hot little slew," a phrase that efficiently conveys something specific about the organ itself and about the feelings of the character describing it...
...Bafflingly, Valérie nevertheless slips him her Paris phone number...
...Houellebecq's constant repetition of the same two or three obscene terms for sexual organs becomes boring and ultimately meaningless...
...Like Michel, he has violent fantasies, and he toys with the idea of incest with his beloved daughter while forcing himself on her 15-year-old sitter...
...Valérie is, effectively, a prostitute who could pay Michel for her services...
...He is gratified by the pleasure they apparently take in having sex with him, as well as by their endearing appreciation of the enormous tips he hands out...
...A weekend of more prolonged joys and Michel is in love...
...The plot is hot terrible...
...Houellebecq quickly loses patience with the technique's restraints and launches into a long recitation of Valerie's sexual history at a point where she and his narrator have scarcely met...
...But for all their explicitness, they are clichéd...
...After realizing that his father's death has left him with few financial worries, Michel decides to take a package holiday to Thailand...
...He is thrilled: "She knew the different things that kept male desire alive...
...Sexual happiness has made him docile...
...His brutish thoughts disappear, he starts to take pleasure in food, and he even has altruistic impulses...
...Platform is certainly meant to be a novel of ideas, but it is unclear whose they are...
...A few sentences later Michel is having apublic moment of ecstasy, no doubt made more acute by his sociological interest in the proceedings...
...Muslims on the whole aren't worth much," Michel thinks...
...On the other hand, you have several billion people who...
...As a treatise, Platform could have been interesting...
...He does the same thing in divulging the secrets of Jean-Yves' marriage, and later includes several scenes of tourist industry business meetings which Michel did not attend...
...An ape might take satisfaction in eating a ripe banana or picking lice off its progeny, but Michel (as the narrator is coyly named) survives mostly on instant mashed potatoes, hates kids, and derives positive feelings only from the application of friction to his genitals...
...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Last YEAR critics got their dander up when Michel Houellebecq won the coveted impac Dublin Literary Award, worth over$100,000, for his 1998 novel, The Elementar)· Particles...
...Houellebecq is not a good enough writer to go beyond the simplest vocabulary...
...What could be more ideal...
...He wants us to believe Michel is transformed by his great sexual love for Valérie, but he is incapable of bringing to their sexual encounters the spark that would illuminate the difference between Michel's feelings for her and for the Thai masseuses...
...It's an ideal trading opportunity...
...it seems to take very little to satisfy him...
...He flubs his chance by drinking too much, saying the wrong thing and falling asleep at a party...
...Though preoccupied by the desire for sex, he dismisses the single French girls on the tour as nondescript, nasty, or "sluttish" (though why the latter should faze him remains unexplained), and concentrates on finding the best sex for hire in each of the towns and villages he visits...
...One is left to wonder why he portrayed himself as so difficult to please...
...It does have a feeling of predictability, and its unhappy ending allows the author to avoid the question of what will happen to Michel and Valerie's love once their passion cools...
...The effect is jarring...
...The book had already irked even his compatriots the year it was published by winning the Prix Novembre—and they were further appalled when he showed up to accept it looking as if he had spent a night on the tiles...
...Not so the world...
...Romance isn't working for him...
...Toward the end of the trip Valérie, a young woman he had previously dismissed as uninteresting, begins an awkward flirtation with him...
...as a novel it is clumsy and occasionally ridiculous...
...As he jumps from perspective to perspective, it appears that Houellebecq wants to have the advantages of omniscience and the posture of a first person narrator...
...Also crude is Houellebecq's handling of the first person voice...
...He and his wife despise each other...
...When one woman argues with him about the morality of prostitution, he thinks crossly, "Was this girl even capable of correctly handling a c.-k...
...Houellebecq's new novel, Platform, offers those readers more of what they fancy...
...Deprived of sufficiently satisfying sex, France, in Houellebecq's view, is full of violence perpetrated by Muslims, particularly against women and the old...
...It is the execution that causes Houellebecq difficulties...
...She suggests that he invite another woman to join them (condoms optional: Michel says we're all far too concerned with health and hygiene...
...That some people actually claimed to enjoy Particles can be seen as proof of the author's contention that Westerners are a bunch of unhappy masochists...
...are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality...
...The Thai women's ministrations, described somewhat clinically, are exactly to Michel's taste...
...Valérie is unstinting with her favors, and to top everything off, it turns out that she makes a great deal of money as the second-in-command to a travel industry executive...
...Or consider the following unnatural conjunction: "'Ina world where the greatest of luxuries is acquiring the wherewithal to avoid other people, the good-natured sociability of middle class German wife swappers constitutes a form of particularly subtle subversion,' I said to Valerie just as she was taking offher bra and panties...
...Yet either sex with Valérie must be shown to be discernibly different, or there must be more to love...
...Back with his female travel companions, he is quickly enraged by the slightest disagreement...
...As in a porn magazine, a small number of acts are repeated in very slightly different progressions, and there is no indication of any intimacy beyond the physical...
...But Muslim opposition to the clubs kills their plans as well as Michel's happiness...
...Fewer and fewer people are venturing abroad, but Michel has a solution: sex tourism...
...They spend their lives looking without finding it, and they are completely miserable...
...A more skilled writer would let his readers know...
...Many writers have done more with sex...
...In trying hard to serve his readers polemic and sex in roughly equal doses, the author has his characters cite tourist studies, quote philosophy and spout dogma at great length, inserting these insights into dialogue that is so leaden it would make Eric Rohmer blush with shame...
...Whether Michel is capable of handling a relationship is also open to question...
...He explains this to Valérie and her boss, JeanYves: "You have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but can no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction...
...Nicholson Baker and Vladimir Nabokov, to name just two, depict it in language that is exciting and playful in itself, and work humor, pathos and character into the mix...
...He has nothing except scorn for Islam's monotheism and restrictive mores...
...Houellebecq seems to assume his sex scenes are the spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of his deeply pessimistic philosophy go down more easily (a metaphor he would replace with something far more lewd...
...If there is more to love, the foundation of Houellebecq's grim philosophy crumbles...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
