=Book recently read: The Map & the Territory by Michel Houellebecq=

There are certain pieces of music that I sometimes hesitate to listen to because of the strong emotional effect—not always positive—that they elicit in me. There are a handful of authors who write books that have a similar power on my psychological state. Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors.

I always pick up his books with caution, knowing that they will invariably threaten my mental equilibrium. As a result, I put off reading "The Map and the Territory" for literally years, until now, when he has just published a new book, "Submission." 

In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus wrote that suicide was the only philosophical question worth considering. And though I'm not sure what Houellebecq's opinion on Camus might be (I get the sense that it wouldn't be altogether a complimentary one), he nevertheless seems to agree with Camus' postulate. All of Houellebecq's work deals primarily with the question of whether life is worth living. In "The Map and the Territory" there are two suicides. In addition, in a shocking twist worthy of a Hannibal Lecter novel, Houellebecq writes into the plot a depiction of his own grisly murder—a kind of death-wish/suicide acted out in fiction. But despite the high body count, Houellebecq comes out on the side of life. Not that he'd choose life had be been given a choice beforehand; in fact, he wrote an appreciative essay on the work of H.P. Lovecraft titled "Against the World, Against Life" that pretty much outlines his position on the matter.  Still, rather surprisingly, Houellebecq has come to feel that we have a moral imperative to live the damn term out now that we're actually here, no matter how grim and gruesome it gets. 

Such a position is surprising only superficially. Given Houellebecq's reputation as a subversive, enfant terrible of French literature (not so enfant now that he's pushing 60),  Houellebecq is actually a writer of very conservative values. He's against the hedonism of the 60s, against euthanasia, against the current rise of Islam inasmuch as he sees it as a threat to Western culture; he's even against cremation. What he's against most of all, though, and what is ultimately so disturbing and mesmerizing about his writing, is any easy or facile answer to what could possibly make life endurable, let alone worth living. And that's where I find myself in perfect solidarity with him in spite of his innate reactionary conservatism.

Art, love, nature, literature, friendship, sex, dogs…they all provide some respite from the brutal, inescapable conditions of our existence, but the fact is that it's only a  respite, only temporary at best. Behind the veil, the death's head is always grinning. In "The Map and the Territory," the police inspector Jasselin has traveled to Sri Lanka to experience Asubha, the Buddhist meditation on the corpse. For two weeks, he contemplates rotting bodies in a mass grave, reciting to himself this mantra: "This is my fate, the fate of all mankind. I cannot escape it." Every Houellebecq book, in one way or another, is the contemplation of the mass grave of humanity, past, present, and future. And therefore it is the contemplation of our grave, too. His books are memento mori in novel form. To borrow a title from Sartre, there's "no exit." It's this unflinching gaze at our inevitable demise that makes his novels so unpopular with so many readers. He holds our heads in place and thumbs up our eyelids. He forces us to look at what most of us would prefer not to see. (There is also in Houellebecq intelligent and sophisticated critiques of politics, economics, history, and art, which few contemporary American novelists would so much as dare to broach for fear of ever finding an audience).

Life isn't worth living. Love and friendships fade. Health fails. Sex grows stale. Children are a waste of time. The happiest person in "The Map and the Territory" is Jasselin, the retiring police inspector, who is sterile, has a dog who's likewise sterile, and who enjoys a comfortable marriage with an intelligent and erotically "good-natured" wife who likes to cook and has had breast implants that will extend their sex life a decade or so longer than one might have expected it to last otherwise. This, Houellebecq suggests, is about the best one can hope to achieve in this world.

In the end, Houellebecq shows us his vision of humanity's fate. It comes by way of his main character, the artist Jed Martin, whose arc of life we've followed throughout "The Map and the Territory." Martin, now aged and terminally ill, completes one final series of art-works that depict the fading away not only of the individual and his memories, but of humanity itself. In the end, nothing human remains. The world is as it was before man first put his mark on nature. The last line of "The Map and the Territory" says it all. "The triumph of vegetation," Houellebecq writes, "is total."

You get the sense that Houellebecq sees this as perfectly apropos, even a relief. Thank God, he seems to be saying with a resigned sigh, it's finally over. We did our duty to life. We can rest at last in oblivion.