Michel Houellebecq’s distinctly French presence in American cultural discourse, to say nothing of American bookshelves, is a fact. His work has managed to infiltrate both sides of our culture war, if not for the same reasons. Generally, if you are on the Right, Houellebecq is the great prophet of civilizational malaise. If you are on the Left, he is, at best, the great satirist of civilizational chauvinism. But as with every culture-war flashpoint, neutrality is deemed contemptible. Indeed, even if he was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there was some truth to Ross Douthat’s 2019 assertion that “the most important novelist of the millennial era is 63 years old and lives in France.” That fact assures the further proliferation of anything Houellebecq commits or has committed to paper.
Interventions 2020 is the second sequel of a collection of essays and interviews that has been revised and expanded since 1999. This is the first version to be translated into English, comprising pieces published between 1992 and 2020. It boasts an array of subjects of great depth and provocation. Yet it is not exempt from the typical unevenness and lapses of judgment that tend to burden such collections.
What you can expect to get out of it requires a rein on your expectations going into it. Houellebecq can certainly be erudite in this book. An essay he wrote for Artforum compares the “indigestible literature” of experimental novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet to the “austere discipline” of pedology. His introduction to the SCUM Manifesto praises Valerie Solanas’s “courage” to go beyond the nature-bound thought of Hobbes and Rousseau with “a progressive and rational attitude … to establish man’s absolute control over nature.” His defense of science fiction as high art, though hardly new even in 2002, at least provocatively declares that “Hiroshima was undoubtedly the necessary condition for science fiction to truly obtain the status of literature.” In one interview, he compares Eric Zemmour to Leo Naphta from The Magic Mountain, “the most fascinating Jesuit in world literature. … Naphta’s intelligence surpasses Settembrini’s, as much as Zemmour’s intelligence surpasses that of his current opponents.”
Erudition only goes so far. While France can boast several masters of concision from Pascal to Barthes, Houellebecq’s fleeting, open-ended meditations — riffs, really — on New York City, silent film, conservatism, the Irish countryside, and COVID-19 are too short to get to whatever point their author has in his head. To be honest, the shallow compositions combined with the chronological structure render reading Interventions 2020 a bit like reading a printed blog. There are pieces with potential, including one on cloning and another on hating going to parties, but they mostly flame out. Houellebecq’s Harper’s essay on former President Donald Trump, though perhaps a barnburner in 2019, reads three years later like an overdue social studies report.
It is better to say that the value of the collection is rooted less in the wisdom it conveys than in the attitude with which it is conveyed. Over three decades’ worth of writing, Houellebecq’s laconic, world-weary tone, at least as translated here by Andrew Brown, is impressively inert. It has shades of Diogenes, George Carlin, and a teenager with a black Sharpie manicure giving a last-minute presentation. If Houellebecq is not a sharp aphorist, he is not lacking in surly put-downs. New York has “a curious atmosphere of decrepitude, death, the end of the world.” The French beauf, translated here as “hick,” has an “animal innocence” and is “devoid of intelligence as well as of humour … of moral sense.” Feminists are “amiable dimwits,” while there is “nothing particularly heroic about conservatives” — hence they “pose no danger.”
To talk about the material in this way will seem as though I’m giving short shrift to the longer, more eloquent pieces on poetry and architecture and the interviews that explore the deeper themes of his novels and his views of Christianity. But I’m not taking any more away from them than the book in its present state already does. A more thematic collection could have been wrung out of these pieces, giving greater weight to Houellebecq’s commitment to literary excellence and his distaste for the modern fixation on efficiency. It would mean prizing Houellebecq the thinker and writer over Houellebecq the personality or the poster boy.
Not that such a collection would have prevented what is sure to follow. Houellebecq’s own imported prose will seep into American thinking and expression — but in imperfect translation. Its laconic introspection will be further flattened into angst, and its cynical humor will be misread as petulance.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His Twitter handle is @cr_morgan.
