The Possibility of an Island Book

(Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

So before anything else, let's just get this out of the way: that if you aren't horrendously and profoundly offended at least once by the work of controversial French author Michel Houellebecq, you're not paying close enough attention. Because Houellebecq, see, is what's known as a misanthrope; that far from being a racist, or a sexist, or a homophobe, he simply hates the entirety of humanity, every last one of us air-breathing meatsacks, and goes to great pains in his celebrated and award-winning novels to detail all the various ways that you too should hate humanity as well. And that of course is what marks him as different than the typical life-hating streetcorner obscenity screamer, is that Houellebecq has some incredibly astute observations about life to back these opinions up; that he has an almost magical ability, in fact, to take the detritus from those "news of the weird" departments, and to somehow combine them all into one of the bleakest yet fairest descriptions of humanity you will ever come across. His truths are difficult truths, and they're often insulting truths, and they are truths that very meticulously pick apart the veneer by which most everyday people live their lives; and it's for all these reasons that so many people have such a violent reaction to Houellebecq's work, and why there are as many haters of his fiction as there are champions of it.

Like...say, the Muslims, a group of which weren't very happy at all with what Houellebecq had to say about them in his 2001 sex-tourism farce Platform; so unhappy, in fact, that this group took Houellebecq to court for "attempting to incite racial violence," which like libel is easier to prove in European courts than American ones. And Houellebecq reacted to this lawsuit (which he was eventually cleared of) in the exact way you would expect Houellebecq to react to such a lawsuit; as if the entire thing was beneath him, and simply further proof of the point he makes in his books in the first place, of what a bunch of mouth-breathing jackasses humanity in general is. And let's face it, in a world of full-frontal nudity in movies and high-school massacres on television, it's almost impossible anymore for a mere novelist to arouse this kind of passion and ire in the general public; and thus it was that Houellebecq became a literary sensation in Europe (which was pretty much ignored by the media in the US, what a surprise), and suddenly found himself rich and famous and with several of his projects suddenly being adapted into major movies.

But a troubling question lingers after all this, of course: that when you write the most outrageous novel of the century, the one that simultaneously made you a media star and almost killed you, what do you do for an encore? In Houellebecq's case, he writes the darkly funny tale The Possibility of an Island, which ostensibly is a dystopian science-fiction novel, but as Houellebecq himself admits near the end, is in actuality an autobiography, his private views on all the things that happened to him as a result of Platform. And in this sense, the book is pretty much the most perfect thing he could've done after Platform -- not to try to outshock the public, which let's face it, he'll never be able to do again, but rather to reflect on both his mistakes and the ones made by the rest of the world, to mercilessly tear apart the culture of fame that made him a Continental star to begin with, and incidentally to further argue the main thrust of all of his books, i.e. that humanity is a pathetic, outdated concept that needs to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. As with his entire oeuvre, those who...