The Possibility of an Island

Houllebebecq is well worth the time it takes to penetrate the occasional obscurity. Read the review of The Possibility of an Island.

This dual story, obviously enough, allows Houellebecq to frame his customarily sardonic, pornographic, and dispiriting human narrative in a moral context; it is the moment at which the novelist can move away from his characters, and tearfully judge them. Daniel may be a bastard, Houellebecq seems to say, like all the bastards in my other novels, but at least the bastards are fighting, however gracelessly, to exercise the fundamental human capacities -- chief of which is not sex, in fact, but love. "I continued all the same,in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love," says Daniel. For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist -- and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it. Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, on the French island of Réunion, in 1956, where his accomplished mother, a reader of Mann and Dostoevsky, worked as a doctor. His father, René Thomas, had left school at thirteen, but was a keen reader. (He liked Céline.) He worked as a grocer, a gardener,and finally as a mountain guide.