Review of Michel Houellebecq's novel, "Whatever"

The Next Camus?

During my last week of a long stay in London, I made my weekly purchase of Time Out London, went to check the theatre listings, but stopped short at the table of contents when an interesting book review caught my attention. The reviewer heralded the by-line of his weekly column with the staggering claim, "the next Camus." Having read The Stranger in college and all of Camus' prose works since, I quickly flipped the pages to the critic's account of first-time novelist's Michel Houellebecq's Whatever (the very rough English translation of his title). Drawn in by the review, I rushed out of the West End flat where I was living, and hurried off to WaterStones (England's answer to Barnes and Nobles), to find numerous copies prominently displayed on the front table. The inside of the dust jacket heralded resplendent praise for Whatever, including numerous awards (the Prix Flore among them), and general acclaim for Houellebecq as the Camus heir ascendant. One critic went so far as to call Whatever "The Stranger for the info generation." The volume itself was slim, and turning over the jacket, I discovered the price, nearly nine pounds—about eighteen dollars at the time, and a good bit to pay for a first novel, even if Camus himself had written it. I passed up the purchase, thinking that I'd pick the book up in the states in a week.

The anticipation I experienced while waiting to read this book found that patience is sometimes unrewarded. The novel carries itself under the voice of a single unnamed narrator, who in addition to his own anticipation approaching thirty, displays the bitter attitude of a person filled with disgust at the world around him. In this, he despairs over seeing his glorious French culture reduced to a commercialized nightmare of sex phone lines, meaningless indulgence in crass materialism and unbridled technology, and the emptiness of unfulfilling jobs. At one point, while gazing into a sunset from the platform of a train station, he thinks, "there could be five or six red suns out there and it wouldn't make a jot of difference to the course of my meditations. I don't like this world. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke."

Houellebecq's narrator, in addition to his job as a systems administrator, divests his leisure time in the writing of illuminating discussions between various animals. In one of these, entitled, "Dialogues Between a Dachshund and a Poodle," Houellebecq reaches a level of unanticipated clarity, doling out to the reader such truffles of wisdom as "Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy," which he subsequently refers to as a "noble truth." Such perceptive discourse allows the narrator to then compare, in a story-within-a-story contrivance, complete sexual liberalism with complete market-economy liberalism, dispassionately observing that each system makes paupers of some while allowing others to accumulate huge fortunes and numerous conquests. This of course, more than implying that the failure of an individual's attractiveness and lack of sexual activity can be attributed to an obvious defect of the unrestrained economics of the sexual "system" in play (and one thought Foucault, and not Marx was the fashion in Paris today)

The French philosophers, famous in this century for giving the world the notion of "the other" finally begin praising the infusion of their own self-imbued ideologies in the arts. In Houellebecq's case, and the ultra-chauvinism of the French all-around, this manifests itself as the all-too-American extremist claim of blaming social dysfunction on technology, consumerism, and a capitalist economy (who remembers reading the Unabomber's manifesto on the very same?). Leaving aside the obvious mistake of understanding the economy of France as an unrestrained free-market capitalism (forty percent of the French people are employed by the French government), Houellebecq's narrator becomes the outsider to this system, unable to participate in the simple joys of modem life that occupy the attention and emotions of those around him.

The difference here, between Houellebecq's narrator and Camus’ Mersault is striking: the latter's indifference and isolation stemmed from a severe existential response ("what does it matter if I do X or Y or Z...that same cool wind blows in from the future" for all of us), and Camus never allowed his characters (true to the rigorous individualism of existentialism) to place the blame for their isolation on any source less abstract than the fact of facing one's personal existence itself.

Houellebecq's success lies in giving us characters suffering their angst a decade after their teens—he presents the young as floating through a world filled with energy and joy, a world against which his narrator stands as the other to them, imagining that his misery, isolation, and re­directed self-loathing naturally result from leaving that carefree world behind.

Furthermore, where Camus, in The Stranger provided a beginning in Mersault's eventual attitude towards death—the facing of that certainty, Houellebecq's unnamed protagonist provides nothing more than a dead end, a parable, if anything, of where feigned self-pitying and deflected bitterness can lead. Where other critics were kinder, seeing his character's attempts at generalizing about the "human condition" (something one would expect current French critics and writers to deride in severe humor), as the results of nearly universal isolation in the information age, it is quite clear that the dispassionate state of Houellebecq's narrator is self-inflicted, and he only attempts to drag the other characters of the novel down with him. While most of the anti-technology literati tailor such an interpretation to suit their already cynical-nostalgic view of the modem world, the last lines of the book make my understanding painfully clear. Lying in a daffodil covered pastoral meadow, Houellebecq's narrator's last thoughts finally run (at thirty, no less) existential: "I feel my skin again as a frontier; and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon."

The comparison of Houellebecq's novel to Camus' quickly becomes a study in contrasts. Mersault presented us with the even-tempered, not-of-this-world portrayal of the well-known myths of Christ or Buddha; the narrator of Whatever gives us only a representation of bitterness, and a bitterness poorly portrayed. I cannot deny that I laughed out loud quite a bit during the earlier parts of the book, where the introduction to the character and the state of his social world is first cynically depicted, but pressing on, I began to realize that I've seen this kind of humor before. But barring that, the barbed tone of the narrator's voice never changes, and like a comedian's over-used shtick, it loses its humor quickly. The French, two-steps behind America this whole century, are now astonishing themselves with the misanthropic humor that stand-up comedians and novelists like Vonnegut, DeLillo, and Salinger have been producing for decades. More so, when the book finally turned violent (the main character hatches a plan to murder a beautiful young woman and the man she leaves a club with, "because" of this system of social hierarchy that he resents), it occurred to me that I've more recently seen this particular brand of humor, and the references to the effects of consumerism more effectively done in Ellis's American Psycho. The comparison's to even that book must end here, simply because, in giving us such a powerful figure derived from the various myths of Don Juan, Ellis did a far better job representing the isolating and dehumanizing effects (if any) of an acquisition-based consumerist culture. But Houellebecq as the next Camus? Whatever.