March 8, 2012
Elaine Blair
The Map and the Territory (novel)
by Michel Houellebecq,
translated from the French by Gavin Bowd
Michel Houellebecq, Turin, Italy, November 2010
Alessandro Albert/Getty Images
Jed Martin, the hero of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, is the first of his major characters to make it to the end of a book without checking into a psychiatric ward or committing suicide. Jed is an artist who becomes successful and then very rich from selling his paintings, but such happy professional circumstances would not normally be enough to insulate one of Houellebecq’s characters from a wretched fate. Life in a Houellebecq novel is violent, with an unaccountably high death rate for bureaucrats, artists, scientists, marketing executives—the sort of affluent Western law-abiders whom we might expect, from an actuarial point of view, to die quietly and sanely of natural causes. In Houellebecq’s novels they burn with a steady fever of anxiety, anger, and sadness that eventually consumes them. They are incredulous that anyone can remain quiet and sane in what they see as a state of cultural emergency.
What’s the problem? The characters would say it has to do with sex, specifically with the cruelties of late-twentieth-century Western mating habits. The lonely, depressed computer programmer who narrates Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever (1994), has a theory about it:
Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never…. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate…. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude...
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also by Houellebecq:
The Art of Struggle (verse and prose)
Michel Houellebecq
Herla, 2010
841 H837a