One thing I love about going to a bookstore such as City Lights in San Francisco—that original haven of the Beat Generation writers—is that I’m sure to walk out of there with a novel I’m not going to find at other, more mainstream bookstores.
In this case, I bought the 2001 novel Platform by Michel Houellebecq, who I’ve never read and who is considered France’s most celebrated and controversial writer. To some he’s a literary provocateur, to others he’s a peddler of sleazy literature. I think he falls somewhere in between.
At 250 pages, Platform is a short novel packaged with a cover that’s appropriate for its content. The narrator is a depressed, friendless, and nihilistic civil servant, also named Michel. “On the whole, I am not good, it is not one of my traits. Humanitarians disgust me, the fate of others is generally a matter of indifference to me, nor have I any memory of ever having felt any ‘solidarity’ with other human beings.”
This guy! And yet he was an interesting character to tag along with. After his father’s death, Michel takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets Valerie, who works in the travel business, and for some reason this perfectly lovely person falls for him. What ensues is a lot of sex fully detailed in graphic, even vulgar scenes. You come across the words “pussy” and “ejaculate” on a regular basis. I’ve got nothing against sex scenes, but despite (or maybe because of) their frequency and anatomical precision in these pages, the scenes more often than not feel sterile and anatomical rather than hot and sexy. It’s hard to write good sex scenes, even for celebrated novelists.
Michel has a great idea for the flagging tourist-trip industry Valerie works in: sex tourism. See, western women are no longer fun and have too much power, leading to men being intimidated and sexually thwarted, but Asian sex workers can fill in the gap. Next thing you know, the company Valerie works for is promoting these sex holidays. What could go wrong? Of course, something disastrously does, involving an attack by Islamic terrorists.
Houellebecq has been accused of Islamophobia, and during his tour promoting this novel, he made the offhand remark that “Islam is the dumbest religion” which resulted in charges against him that were eventually dropped. But he’s returned to criticizing Islam in subsequent books.
Despite this Platform’s flaws, I became absorbed, and I admired the way Houellebecq cleverly shifted and evolved the plot, giving this reader a few surprises along the way, which I’m always grateful for. I hate that most novels have a predictable story arc, and Platform felt refreshing. And the climax and the ending—I didn’t expect it.
I often include a caveat in some of the less mainstream novels I read that “it’s not for everyone, even though it was for me.” The same caution holds true here, but at the same time, I think this one is worth checking out for being unlike most novels we read. Perhaps the best thing I can say is that I’ll probably pick up another one of his books, and I won’t wait until the next time I’m at City Lights to do it.
