On 3 September 2001, Moroccan newspaper Libération menacingly declared of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, ‘This Man Hates You’. Who is he?
Houellebecq’s career follows a classic trajectory. Up from the provinces, he sought fame in the capital. It is a career inflected by the mores of the 1960s, whose damage to the West is his prime subject.
Houellebecq was born on 26 February 1958 on the island of Réunion, off the east coast of Africa. His father, whom he described in the poem ‘Non Reconcilié’ (from his first collection of verse Rester Vivant, 1991) as ‘un con solitaire et barbare’ (a solitary and barbarous old bastard), was a mountain guide. The loathed father of Michel in Platform is a mountaineer. Houellebecq’s parents abandoned him to his much-loved paternal grandmother when he was six. This is the fate of Bruno in Atomised. Houellebecq’s mother, to whom he has never since spoken, followed the hippy trail in the 1960s, as did the mother of the half-brothers Bruno and Michel of Atomised.
Each of his three novels—titled, in English, Whatever (1994), Atomised (1998) and Platform (1999)—draws with plaintive energy on his life. Houellebecq took a degree in agricultural engineering, married, had a son, was unemployed, divorced, was admitted to a psychiatric clinic for depression (like a male character in each of the books). His literary career began, improbably, with a book on the occultist and novelist H.P. Lovecraft. By the early 1990s he was a prize-winning poet. Whatever became an underground hit, and was later filmed. Atomised was a European-wide best seller and led to his being ejected from the editorial board of the left-wing journal Perpendiculaires as reactionary and misogynist.
That is the kind of prescriptive judgment that his fiction reprehends. Houellebecq has written a witty poetic manifesto, ‘Dernier Rempart Contre le Libéralisme’ (last stand against liberalism), from his second volume of verse, Le Sens du Combat (1996). Indeed, in verse he is most often at play, even as the grimmest themes of his fiction are rehearsed. The books of poetry—the third was Renaissance (1999)—parallel the progression of the argument of the novels. Far from being a reactionary, Houellebecq more closely resembles the paradoxical figure of a romantic nihilist in the manner of Henry Miller. He sang his poems to the music of Bernard Burgalat on the CD Présence humaine; he features doomed, poignant love stories in Atomised and Platform and seems to