(As before, what follows contains spoilers.)
Trade #1 Appendix
April 8, 2025
I finished The Elementary Particles not super in love with it, yet I still felt like there was something in there worth exploring more. I decided I might as well give Houellebecq another shot. This time I went with The Map and the Territory.
Suboptimalism had told me that Houellebecq is one of those authors that just keeps writing the same book over and over, which I can kind of see. At least when comparing these two books, I’d say it feels more like “iteration”. The essence of The Elementary Particles for me was the relationship between its two male protagonists who, despite being very different, were both isolated from the world, and yet precisely in that isolation they shared a strange emotional bond that neither could quite put into words. The Map and the Territory takes that premise, and in its first half develops it in a way that feels more sincere. All of the polemic against individualism and the sweeping critiques of Western civilization are gone. The characters aren’t superlatives in terms of their depravity or misanthropy. They feel human.
The primary protagonist is the artist Jed Martin, who roughly corresponding to Michel from The Elementary Particles. He first became famous for his photographs of the areas depicted in Michelin Guide maps, and then later on for a series of paintings he did that depict a full range of all the professions that make the modern world possible. The narration follows him as he prepares for an exhibition of his work. His gallerist suggests he get a famous writer to do a pamphlet about his work, so who does he get but Houellebecq himself, who suddenly descends into the book like some semi-divine presence. This is the second member of the strange pair that the book revolves around. He has a role similar to Bruno’s, in that he starts as a weird alcoholic and then gradually finds peace with himself before tragedy strikes. In this case Houellebecq gets brutally murdered, and so the second half of the book is about the aftermath of the author’s own death. Yet there’s something nice about that rather peaceful first half. Jed paints Houellebecq’s portrait, comes and visit him at his ancestral home in the country, and listens to Houellebecq cry because the only three commercial products he has ever cared have all been discontinued. You get the sense that the real life author Houellebecq is writing an imaginary friend for himself. Somehow, despite such a ridiculous premise, he manages to avoid self-indulgence. That’s by far the greatest accomplishment of the book.
This is probably a silly way to characterize the book, but I had the idea of calling it a “third-person I-novel”. A typical I-novel is framed as a first person confession by its own real life author. Often they are intimate portrayals of self-destruction as he or she careens towards doom. Yet due to the fact that they are about their own author, a real human being who necessarily has to be alive in order to write the book, they can contain as much suffering as they’d like, but they’re unable to go so far as depicting their author’s own death. So, instead, Houellebecq writes in the third person. We see his death,and how this single imaginary friend reacts to it. Houellebecq grapples with the question of “how much value am I to the world?” and he manages to come up with an answer that, if nothing else, feels sincere.
Part of me wishes I’d read it first, but I’m not sure if it would have hit so hard if I hadn’t already spent a few hours inside Houellebecq’s head while reading The Elementary Particles. At least The Elementary Particles produced a vision in me of Houellebecq the author that Houellebecq the character in The Map and the Territory could play with and subvert. It’s a beautiful book.
Anyway, please send me your book trade ideas! I want to write something that isn’t about Houellebecq.