I had sworn off Houellebecq. Nothing personal, just that after "Platform", "The Possibility of an Island," and "The Elementary Particles," I had "gotten the point," so to speak. The returns were diminishing, and Houellebecq's particular obsessions were beginning to grate a bit. But I had picked up the, uh, titular title, years ago in Germany, and never touched it until a month ago when I decided it would be a good way to practice my French.

This is easily his best novel. The shortest and the most focused. It's also a key to his other novels: Here he lays out all his theories and his obsessions, including his theory on the liberalization of sexuality, the grimness of modern life, and his half-optimism about science. You even catch a glimpse of his love of sci-fi with the narrator's animal fables.

To summarize the plot, the narrator is a nameless loser programmer. Things happen to him, mostly mundane. At some point, a coworker, who's somehow an even bigger loser, dies, and this this leads to his total mental breakdown. This is all done masterfully. Houellebecq lays out his artistic manifesto pretty early on, and it's a pretty good one: The novel, as an art form, is unsuitable to describing the lives of most people, which are boring and pointless. We need, he says, something much duller and flatter than the novel. And he's right! And he does an admirable job of solving this issue.

His company office, for example, is painted in beautiful greys and beiges; a grisaille of boredom. I know every single one of these people. I know them in my bones, these polite but uninterested nerds, the bulk of every office's biomass. I can see the shitty hotel bars, the grey Northern European weather... But most of all, the depression! Reader, you may not know this, but your dear reviewer has himself suffered from some pretty severe depression, and Houellebecq captures it to a fucking T. The doing nothing all day, the crawling inside your own asshole with philosophy, dread of having to try to fall asleep, the incredibly scary and sudden desire to self-harm... Look, it's bad stuff, suffice to say. But Houellebecq describes it correctly, and that is not easy. The urge to moralize about it, to turn it into a virtue, to give it some kind of meaning, is way too strong. Again, this partly because of the same fundamental pressures that the novel, as a medium, exerts: It demands a narrative where there is none. And the resolution to his depression (incomplete, medicine-based) also fits my own experience. Houellebecq has a healthy hatred of psychologists and a healthy respect for psychiatrists, and that is always a good sign.

Houellebecq is back (becq?) in my good book!

Rating: 5 antidepressants