Among the previous generation of American novelists, the sensibility closest to Houellebecq’s is Saul Bellow’s—passionately engaged but authoritative and judgmental, an essayist’s sensibility as much as a novelist’s. If his characters frequently hold crackpot opinions, jthat never make his novels feel like crackpot projects. Houellebecq, educated at the elite National Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There is a fussy statisticality about his writing: “The year 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, despite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression…. Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of Southern France. In the space of a few months, the number of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45.”
I've read three of his novels — The Elementary Particles, Submission, and The Map and the Territory (which I reviewed). I think he's a must-read. (I have Serotonin, but haven't got around to reading it yet.) Odd that this article doesn't that he his pen name is the maiden name of the grandmother who raised him. His birth name is Michel Thomas. Here is my review of The Map and the Territory.
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