Recognisably Houellebecq

Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English.
 
In this latest offering by French literature’s preeminent provocateur, we follow the career of Jed Martin, a successful artist with no ambition to be one. Struggling to make sense of his growing fame after breaking up with ‘one of the five most beautiful women in Paris’, a leggy Russian blonde named Olga, Martin befriends the novelist Michel Houellebecq — a depressed, decrepit, misogynist drunk with a penchant for cured meats and consumerism who lives in seclusion in Ireland. Houellebecq writes about Martin’s forthcoming show; the artist paints the writer. But the plot takes a typically brutal turn when Houellebecq’s fictional alter-ego is gruesomely murdered, his body shredded with a laser, his bones piled up in the chimney of his childhood home in rural France.