Name: Whatever
Rating: 3.46875 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9781847651617

Michel Houellebecq

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system Houellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, Houellebecq's bitter, sarcastic and exasperated narrator vociferously expresses his frustration and disgust with the world.

Whatever

Cult novel about French Generation X. Book sold 40000 copies in France and won may prizes for the author who is a poet and father figure of new school of writing and literary magazine Perpendiculare.

A Novel

Tim Pendry

Houellebecq's first novel (1994), possibly somewhat over-praised at the time, might be sub-titled 'depression and nihilism under late liberal capitalism' and it is not nearly as twisted and nasty as some critics would like us to believe. They should get out more. In fact, it is rather sad because our thirty year old hero is having a mental breakdown and the nastiness and bitterness derive from not wholly false (intellectual) assessments of the place of the person, the individual, in society. The intellectual or 'philosophical' passages may be what is expected in the French novel but are rather boring (there are mercifully few of them). The novel redeems itself wholly with the initially quite witty observations of the 'hero' about his world and his depressed reflections on himself. The reader may find it a confusing experience because the depression unfolds very slowly and in stages as a philosophical nihilism that most reviewers seem to have seen in rather superficial and grandiloquent terms, missing the very personal nature of the experience. Perhaps there is a dash of a replaying of Camus' 'The Stranger' at one point. Certainly there are many French cultural references. But this is actually about one relatively young man stuck in a society whose rhetoric is one of freedom but which is enslaved by nature. There are two grand themes about this world which is now, two decades later, beginning to break apart at the seams. One is about the intrinsic unfairness that lies in the human condition and the other is about our entrapment within it. Let us take our entrapment first. The author gives us a rather neat tale of a chimpanzee smashing himself against the bars of his small cage and with a high chance of committing suicide in his despair. Suddenly one wall falls away and he is faced with a bottomless abyss. Does he leap into the abyss to remove his pain? No he does not. The offer of freedom from pain is sufficient although conditions have not changed one jot. Our society is like that. We are all caged by its demands but it is so structured that there is always an illusion of freedom to choose escape. The book presents us with two parallel systems that govern all our lives - the economic and the sexual. These will intersect but both are characterised by an inbuilt inequity which can never be decisively resolved although some radical socialists may dream otherwise. The economic one - exemplified by the corporate world in which our computer programmer lives - is the one that we are all aware of and struggle over politically. This where some have access to resources and some do not and, in fact, our 'hero' really has nothing to complain about. The sexual one is as driven by nature as the economic one is by the market, the first imposed on us by evolution and our status as animals and the second emerging out of the struggle for resources that has emerged out of our struggle for genetic survival. I say that the economic one is the one that we struggle over politically and not the sexual one but that has changed since the book was published. We have been accepting economic inequity as normal for quite some time and the new cultural politics has moved us into sexual territory. I would like to think that our cultural politics might deal with some of the inequities of the sexual system but it is doing the opposite, closing off more and more paths for the unattractive and vulnerable and opening up more and more opportunities for the young and beautiful. It is the sexual system, a system of nature, that depresses and darkens the life of our 'hero'. He is just average and he sees above and below him in the pecking order the nubile and the beautiful who have life choices he has not and the ugly who have not even his choices. Far from being nasty and nauseating, our hero's analysis of 'bitterness' (the necessary lot of the unattractive) is based on a form of love, not just as aspiration for himself but of the aspirations of the unattractive, sympathy for those who will never get what the above average will get. This may be one of the most 'moral' books I have ever read albeit it is the perverse evisceration of what passes for morality in our society in the manner of De Sade. His sexual philosophy neatly parallels the anger and bitterness that fuels anarchist and socialist 'ressentiment' of the wealthy. It raises awkward questions about God and society (left somewhat elliptically to us to unravel although clearly beyond the mental capacity of literary reviewers). To some extent he is responding to Nietzsche's question of what happens when 'God is dead' and perhaps what happens to those who cannot be joyful happy pagan warriors and prophets. After all God is dead and we are left with the facts of nature and markets. God is covered by a rather predictable and conventional friendship with a priest, a running trope in French literature that goes back beyond De Sade, so the critique of the social is what is interesting, especially as no one can question anything because no one can change anything. The relationship with the priest does, however, give us a disturbing story of loneliness in old age, the clinging to faith (and who would deny this as salve who is not inherently cruel) and a callous euthanasia by those who are calculating within the economic system. A conservative nihilism and bitterness about life exhibits itself as a desperate nastiness which emerges in the frustrations of the ugly (just as we see them in the bloody resentments of the poor) and derives ultimately from disappointment, perhaps in God and certainly in our animal society. I suspect reviewers, if not quite always the beautiful, do not have trouble getting laid in general so perhaps may not want to deal with this head on and would prefer to think in terms of the French cultural overlay rather than the core of the book. I decided to sweep them aside. And that leads us to what is so sad about this book? That there is nothing to be done but withdraw from the world and wait for death if you are not one of the blessed (no, I don't think that myself but, then, it turns out that, relatively speaking, I am one of the blessed so I would not, would I?) I have some sympathy with Houellebecq's character, not with the bitterness and nastiness and murderous impulses (because I simply do not need them) but with his view of the unfairness of the world and the lack of any reasonable means of rectifying it. The socialists have at least a theory of correcting the market even if it results in perhaps other equal harms in the long run but what do we have to correct nature ... maybe genetics nowadays but don't tell me that it won't be the rich that get the benefits of that long before the rest of us. A sexual 'socialism' cannot solve the problem of relative attraction and erotic capital through 'free love'. On the contrary, the fairest past solution to equity was probably the tyranny of catholic traditionalism which blocked the free flow of the sexual market through rules of repression. Houellebecq captures this nicely at one point: "In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate." Social stability and fairness in other words is necessarily based on a degree of manufactured sclerosis and repression and this is not presented as quite the bad thing we may all have been trained to believe it is if we are at all egalitarian. Perhaps we can see the angry roots of a justifiable demotic national populism in this philosophy and Macronism as a devastating liberal politics that will speed up the process of placing blind market and blind nature ahead of the survival of the weakest and most vulnerable. Beneath the depression, sneering, detachment and nastiness of the young computer programmer lie affecting stories that demand the sort of compassion that catholicism once insisted upon in its flawed and clumsy way. You can tell that the author is deeply troubled by the story of the very fat, unattractive, excluded school girl from the hero's youth or the impossibility of his ugly 28 year old friend, struggling to his very brutal end, never ceasing to be a virgin unless he enters into the market and buys sex. His friend, Tisserand, is taken out of the gene pool unable to take out someone beautiful and attractive from that same gene pool in an unwitting revenge for his lot orchestrated by our post-Sadeian philosopher. It is the story of our species unless war is partly our way of culling the strong. Tisserand will not give up until the end. He struggles remorselessly although there is really no hope for him (at least not as a very ugly 28 year old in the clubs) and fights not to give up nature and have to rely on the advantage he has in the economic system (his decent pay). For Houllebecq, we are all just blind sperm, relying on chance and necessity to fertilise the egg and, if someone gets there before us who is 'fitter', no matter, we just struggle on regardless. Struggle and waste and so cruelty. The natural order. Now that the old order had passed with its repressions and even spread of misery, one comes to realise just how cruel elite liberalism has become in trying to destroy the market-driven sex industry which is the only hope for many at the bottom of the sexual pile. And how callous our educational system has become in not demanding codes of conduct that emphasise inclusion and kindness alongside 'achievement' and 'skills'. And how callous we can all be in treating the lonely as things to ignore and then have others process. This is not a masterpiece. It is a first novel. But it is a usefully troubling book. I too have often been angered at a non-existent God for his cruelty and the book lays bare that cruelty in a way I have not seen done so directly elsewhere. Humans may take moral responsibility for the market but only God can take responsibility for nature. And nature, pace the cuddly David Attenborough and the eco-loons, is a cess-pit of waste and cruelty as well as an aesthetic glory and balm for the individual soul. In retrospect, I can see that much of my 'moral life' has been spent dealing with the same conundrum of fairness that our hero tries to deal with and that clearly Houellebecq was also trying to master conceptually. My cold analysis is pretty well his but I am aware that I never had to go down the route of his hero because 'nature' and even to a lesser extent the market had stacked a lot of cards in my favour. I have no cause for bitterness and so nastiness but I still feel great cause for anger at our condition. To me, any advantaged person should not have to pauperise themselves or slash their faces for the sake of equality (I would say that would I not) but, without being patronising, they should make every effort to recognise the pain and misery of those who are not genetic winners. This means, for me, an attitude of kindness, a thinking-ness about making things easier and not worse, a refusal to flaunt advantage, generosity without giving false hope, support for solutions that show awareness of the conditions of others and demanding an egalitarian science. Our culture is not kind. Although a quarter of a century old, I am not sure much has improved since this thought-provoking and potentially depressing novel. Maybe it is much the same and will always be the same. Maybe it is worse. But it has not got better.

Strong first chapter, funny moments from the workplace, and some good prose. But ultimately just kinda sad and that's all.

Sarah E

all too depressing and all to real. enjoyed reading it and it went by pretty quick.

Maya

all too depressing and all to real. enjoyed reading it and it went by pretty quick.



Antonio Bolio

Funny and real. I felt as if a friend was telling me a story that he'd never told anyone.

M. Marques

I expected too much of a book I shouldn’t have had expectations for.

Katie Chua

houellebecq debut novel and i highly enjoyed it. it goes by fast and feels a little directionless at first but it picks up steam about half-way through maybe 2/3 a way through and it felt worth it.

Houellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation.

Josh Clement

I liked the depressive rants and one liners like this: "Saying you’ve lost your car is tantamount to being struck off the social register." I liked the healing experience in nature.

Beatrice Falby

If you want to waste a few hours to give yourself a headache, then please pick up this book.

Whatever

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