Book Review: Readings

Platform

Knopf, 259pp., $25

Angling for a fatwa seems that most nervy of literary endeavors these days, but in this department author Michel Houellebecq has put Salman Rushdie to shame with the publication of his third novel, a work that so excoriates Islam (while simultaneously strutting and crowing about Thai sex tourism like a prized bantam cock, no less) that the author found himself on trial in his native France last September on charges of inciting anti-Muslim sentiment. Houellebecq was eventually exonerated, but his statements at the trial, among them this gem: "Islam is the most bloody stupid religion in the world," were hardly the apology magistrates and the French Human Rights League, who joined the case along with a number of Muslim groups, were expecting. Rushdie, by the way, sided with Houellebecq.

That was some 10 months ago, and while the Euro-furor has died away some, it's almost certain to ignite once more with the incendiary novel's current stateside publication, if anyone can be bothered to read a French novel, that is. (Perhaps Knopf should market it as a freedom novel?) Platform isn't French in the traditional sense, meaning clotty with ennui, or overly rich in characterization, or whatever the contemporary French novel signals these days, but its protagonist, Michel Renault, a fortysomething Parisian bureaucrat, bears all the hallmarks of what the Bush administration secretly thinks of Frenchmen: He's lazy, dull, and vapid, a misanthrope prone to the knee-jerk-off eroticism of adult videos, hookers, and late-night channel surfing. As the novel opens, his father has just been murdered by a young Saudi man caught up in a fit of pique, and while Michel fantasizes about killing the killer, he also has this to say about his dear old dad: "He had made the most of his life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. 'You had kids, you fucker,' I said spiritedly ... I was a bit tense, I have to admit." For Houellebecq's emotionally stunted anti-hero, the grieving process consists of one part vacuous rage to two parts mild annoyance: He's just happy to get three free days off from his job. Casting about for something to do with his unexpected inheritance, Michel hits on the idea of world travel, and, more to the point, a trip to Bangkok, where he can be rid of the hordes of boring Westernized sheep that clutter his world (as he sees it) and get his rocks off around the clock via the Thai capital's famed sex quarter. To Michel's deadened, hedonistically inclined mind, nothing exceeds like excess, and so off he goes, primed for all manner of debauchery. There he meets, and eventually falls in love with, Valerie, another Parisian, with whom he forms the novel's only real relationship. She, too, is in love with the tangibilities of the flesh, and together they explore all things sexual, and then some.

Houellebecq doesn't shy away from near-pornography in his fliply licentious descriptions of the push-me-pull-you thrill of (literally) cheap sex -- in quasi-mainstream contemporary literature only Catherine Millet, in her recent autobiographical The Sexual Life of Catherine M., and last year's extended roman à blowjob, Rapture, by Susan Minot, have dealt so unprovincially with the mechanics of the sex act -- but Houellebecq has more on his mind that simple orgiastics. Platform's core argument is one of globalism, really, though of a conspicuously bent sort: On the one hand you have jaded Westerners for whom the sex act has become denuded and void, but who have the financial wherewithal to do just about anything, on the other, literally billions of the economically disenfranchised who still view human sexuality as a gift from God -- combine the two and you've got a form of sexual capitalism that will serve both interests (just so long as you keep the Islam out of it). It's a stultifyingly broad argument, but an interesting one to be sure, and Platform runs with it, to the point that Valerie and Michel embark on creating a chain of top-notch sex hotels for Westerners in Bangkok. Then comes the terrorism. Platform is by turns shockingly vile and shockingly banal, written with an ear toward pissing off just about everyone (unsurprisingly, American culture comes in for some nasty, if clever, barbs). That said, Houellebecq's novel is tough to put down no matter how much you'd like to. It should have arrived in a plain, brown wrapper, perhaps, but like good porn it's increasingly difficult to draw your eyes away as it oozes toward climax.