Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be ‘about’ paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert’s passion as a metaphor for the Master’s onomastic infatuation with America (does anyone accuse Yeats of having validated copulation with swans because he made Leda the subject of a poem?).
Platform has been admired, as was the same author’s Atomised, by worthy sponsors. Clearly they detect merits that go beyond the blow-by-blow sexual activity calculated – others might say – to service those who, as Rousseau said, ‘read with one hand’. Jonathan Meades compared Platform not only to ‘late Nabokov’ – Houellebecq does indeed offer an (unacknowledged) clin d’oeil to the ‘Venus Villas’ which figure in Ada – but also, by virtue of its ‘sod-you bravura’, to ‘the young Martin Amis/middle-period Burgess and, most of all, the De Lillo of Libra’.
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