The Map and the Territory

If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk. His life has been a tabloid train-wreck of drink, divorce, lawsuits, Islamophobic outbursts and tax exile to Ireland. His first four novels – Whatever (1994), Atomised (1998), Platform (2001) and The Possibility of an Island (2005), all widely translated – are feasts of misogyny and misanthropy. His main subjects seem to be alienation, consumerism and the importance of sex – lots of it, described in relentless detail. That latter preoccupation has made Houellebecq the rare French novelist who sells well overseas.

Actually, France does have a prize for most provocative writer: the Goncourt, the country’s top literary gong. For more than a century, Goncourt selections have been igniting outrage that makes Britain’s Man Booker Prize seem tamely consensual. From Marcel Proust onward, dozens of winners have been pilloried in the French press as insufficiently talented, decorous, French or grateful. When Houellebecq (pronounced “Wellbeck”) was awarded the prize last December for his latest novel The Map and the Territory, he was convicted on most of those counts, as well as a new one: lifting several passages from French Wikipedia, to which he blithely confessed. The novel itself was grudgingly praised as witty and well-plotted, and enthusiastically panned as slick, self-indulgent and shrewdly targeted. “With great skill and a certain marketing-style cynicism,” sniffed Pierre Assouline, a leading critic, “Michel Houellebecq created a manufactured product which the Goncourt committee could not refuse.”

In other words, The Map and the Territory is a delight to read – a felony in contemporary French fiction, where navel-gazing and high seriousness are valued over mere accessibility. Though readers of the book’s new English translation may be puzzled by all the Gallic celebrity cameos – it helps to know your Frédéric Beigbeders from your Michel Druckers – The Map and the Territory is vigorously, enjoyably un-French.

Like all Houellebecq novels, it has an emotionally stunted protagonist modelled on the author – two, in fact. There is Jed Martin, a French artist who gains notice with his photographs of old Michelin road maps. (The book’s title comes from semanticist Alfred Korzybski’s aphorism that “the map is not the territory”.) Martin soon befriends a French novelist named Michel Houellebecq. Like the original, this Houellebecq has a reputation for drunkenness and “strong misanthropic tendencies”, a fondness for charcuterie and a serious case of athlete’s foot. Well into the book, Houellebecq is murdered with picturesque brutality, and what was a meditation on Martin’s inability to enjoy or even comprehend his growing artistic fame turns into a brisk police procedural, with excursions into euthanasia, art theft and trafficking in endangered fauna.

Never much of a wordsmith, Houellebecq (the real one) here at least gives it a try. He visits a Paris restaurant “where polite and discreet waiters operated in silence, as if in a burns unit”. He describes the current, economically insecure era as one in which “a veil of ashes seemed to have spread over people’s minds”. Houellebecq also seems to have stumbled upon characters he actually likes. Jed Martin’s pathological indifference is redeemed by rising concern for the health of his cold and distant father, who turns out to be sympathetic after all. Martin even grows fond of the novel’s comically unlikeable Houellebecq. Admirably, The Map and the Territory also skewers the art world’s pretentious jargon and galloping mercantilism. As Martin asks his novelist friend: “What is a painting, actually, but a particularly expensive piece of furniture?”

All this without a serious sex scene, a cringe-inducing religious slur or a paean to prostitution. Has Houellebecq gone soft? Close readers of his work, which includes poetry and screenplays, might argue that he has long been a secret humanist. Though he can treat women as sex toys, his female characters are mostly confident, level-headed and accomplished – as is Martin’s Russian-born girlfriend, a rising Michelin executive he loves and, through lack of nerve, loses. Though several of Houellebecq’s previous novels glory in sex tourism and partner-swapping, the practitioners often meet bad ends. And The Map and the Territory’s acknowledgements page is a model of grace and humility; Houellebecq even thanks the French police for advice on investigative procedures.

His real-life friend Frédéric Beigbeder, a respected French novelist (Michel Drucker is a chat-show host), once said that if he’d had a childhood like Houellebecq’s, he would have killed himself. Houellebecq’s footloose parents abandoned him at a young age, and he was raised by relatives. The author has retaliated by creating several repulsive parental characters. His octogenarian mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, hit back in 2008 with a withering memoir, calling him an “evil, stupid little bastard”. As if to prove Beigbeder’s point.

The late novelist John Updike once summed up the conventional view of Houellebecq by deploring the French writer’s “thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity”. The Map and the Territory may force a revision of that judgment. It reveals Houellebecq’s worst quality to be not contempt for humanity but simply a taste for attracting attention, a trick every neglected boy learns early on. Then he grows up.

Donald Morrison is author of ‘The Death of French Culture’ (Polity)

The Map and the Territory, by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd, William Heinemann, RRP£17.99, 304 pages