One thing is clear from the outset. The liberation of sexual practices in the last decades of the twentieth century did reorient all of culture around sex. It was hardly unprecedented for a society to devote itself drastically to a single instinct; think of the headhunting tribe's elevation of aggression. But the consequences were unpredictable in the advanced societies of the United States and Western Europe.

It would have been possible to foresee an etiquette by which people would partake of sex as they agreed to lunch or coffee, casually and with the same degree of politeness and duty. How grateful we could have been for such a development. A society so gentle and egalitarian would preserve access to sex for the aged and unattractive and relieve the beautiful and young of a persistent carnal burden. Certainly America and Europe after 1970 have had few newer and more urgent interests than serving an expanded eroticism. But this service took a less benign shape. The West focused its fantasies on a small spectrum of sexualized youth, age sixteen to twenty-four. Establishing the sexual superiority of the young, it created a false economy of scarcity and competition. Neo-Darwinism justified it with a discourse of evolutionary fitness, as if the whole of evolution led up to this sexual valuation of people barely past adolescence. Adult desire modeled itself on a longing for youth; not only on the wish for young bodies, but on the maintenance of a lifestyle of individual gratification. Commerce inserted the goods and services of technology into the necessities of sex, with paraphernalia, cameras, sex therapy, Viagra, enhancement surgery, and pornography. In short, it has proven our fate to inflate the meaning of sexuality wildly, within a market economy, when we could have acknowledged an equal capacity for sex in everyone and its general unimportance.

The critique of contemporary sexuality is the trademark of the novelist, essayist, and poet Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is one of the few new European writers to have caused international excitement. He is a sex novelist famous for scandal but capable of thought. The Frenchman's range, his vocation for social prophecy, and his erratic persona (drunk, depressed, licentious) have placed him in a tradition alongside heroic figures very much unlike him, including Camus, whose work he compulsively travesties. His declarations of the spread of the market to untouched realms of private life have a long history, from Marx to Marcuse. Houellebecq uses the ideas of the left against itself, to extend a restless criticism to spheres we had believed were preserves of freedom. Marcuse seems a special object of revenge, punished for his belief that Eros could remain exempt from the dialectical progress of capitalist enlightenment. If Houellebecq's ideas are not entirely original, his vivid portrayals and single-minded attacks give him almost sole title to an anti-liberatory line of sexual thinking.

In Houellebecq's first novel, Extension of the Domain of Struggle (1994, translated in America as Whatever), he intimated that sex in contemporary times has become a second system of social differentiation. It resembles wealth but has still more disastrous consequences of stratification. For Houellebecq, sexual liberation led to an absolute sexual pauperization for the mass of average people-who are neither unusually alluring nor socially adept, and who stay home alone in their misery. By the same processes, ridiculous sexual prestige, pretension, and license came to an arbitrary few. Liberation was neoliberal, transferring the market economy into the private sphere, whose humane character previously had been protected by institutions of family that had only been seen as repressive. "[S]exual liberalism," he wrote, "is the extension of the domain of struggle, its extension to all stages of life and all classes of society." In The Elementary Particles, his second novel, Houellebecq traced the origins of the collusion between liberation and market forces to the hippies and liberals of the 1960s. (He also fantasized, with characteristic extravagance, that genetic engineering could be used to eradicate the two sexes, allowing civilized happiness to blossom once human beings were superseded.)

THE NEWEST NOVEL, Platform, recently published in America, defends sex tourism. Houellebecq's critique has changed. According to him now, Thai prostitutes and European tourists are made for each other. The sexual unhappiness of the West will be cured, and in turn the flow of cash and services will cure the financial underdevelopment of the East. "Myself, I [see] no objection to sexuality going back into the domain of the market economy," Houellebecq's narrator says-at least when the sex economy becomes this naked and open. Directly contradicting an earlier position, Houellebecq also seems to be arguing that there's something about the most overtly commercial sex that's spiritually redemptive. But it proves to be commerce itself, not sex, that's at the center of Platform's healing fantasy-and a form of non-Western violence, rather than a struggle inherent to the system of the West, that's the enemy.

Platform is a Frankenstein. It begins with a murder mystery that gets solved by page 12. "Father died last year": the first words parody The Stranger and its famous dead mother. A Muslim bludgeoned Michel's father to death, we soon learn-and it is as if the anonymous Arab killed on Camus's beach had returned for revenge. Houellebecq loses no time in announcing his inversion of the moral gravity of France's best-known midcentury novel. This accomplished, his hero can go on vacation; he flies to Thailand to launch the novel's real offensive against morals. The book's second act is a travelogue. We learn that Thai sex masseuses are generous, appreciative, family-oriented, and entrepreneurial. European women, on the other hand, are cruel and psychologically stunted. Michel makes fun of a number of them who join him on a package tour. Only one woman seems different, he notices, in breaks between massages, masturbation, and reading American thrillers-a mousy fellow vacationer named Valérie.

Michel and Valérie become lovers as soon as they return to Paris. In its third act, by far the most entertaining, the novel develops a tale of business. Sex continues, to be sure: at an S&M club, incorporating a hotel chambermaid in Cuba, or with an elegant stranger in a sauna. But Valérie's career is what matters. She is right-hand woman to a rising star of the tourist industry, Jean-Yves. The pair have become sole directors of a campaign to revive a chain of Club-Med-style resorts. With Michel as their creative force and moral support, they decide to reposition the hotels as humanitarian brothels-spas where ordinary middle-class holidaymakers can employ sex workers without danger or shame. Valérie and Jean-Yves make some choices, consult practically no one, and transform the world.

Now Michel has two perfect outlets for the instinct to happiness that modern life had cauterized in him. The corporate planning makes him a sort of artist. It satisfies his creative side as his former career arranging "cultural events" and art openings never did. "In a state of excitement that was a little bit unreal, we established a planning platform for dividing up the world. The suggestions that I was going to make might have as a consequence the investment of millions of francs, or the employment of hundreds of people; for me it was new, and quite breathtaking." At the same time, heroic doses of sex, shared with the blessed and willing Valérie, restore in him the serene innocence needed for true happiness and love. Michel is fast on his way to becoming a contented house-husband. A truly open and paid-for sex is truly liberating: no more anomie; no more competition; only his beloved's paycheck, cooking dinner, and a bonheur à deux, enhanced with occasional threesomes. The market, suitably unburdened of hypocrisy or restraint, can be a salvation.

In act four-a kind of epilogue-the fantasy collapses. As their first Thai sex-resort opens, and Michel and Valérie agree to marry, to settle at the hotel together, and to live in absolute bliss, a cadre of turbaned terrorists invades the tourist settlement. The Muslims machine gun Valérie to death at dinner, along with many of the hotel's patrons, and blow up a nightclub in the tourist center. That's it. In Paris, newspapers blame the tourists for violating the terrorists' moral values. Michel wends toward oblivion.

PLATFORM IS NOT GOOD, as The Elementary Particles was. It's written badly by an author who has demonstrated elsewhere an austere command of language. It's very funny, of course. Houellebecq's defeats are more interesting than other authors' successes. Still, for many readers the book will just be unpleasant. Some will find it, as I did, all too pleasant, and this is the thing that needs to be explained, especially for a book so literarily sloppy. The problem of Houellebecq as a whole is why he is so lovable even when he's posturing. Platform presents a certain Western inner monologue, with little distortion or hypocrisy, that can be occasionally revealing but is always deeply ingratiating. The pleasure of the book despite its poverty is its one really striking feature.

This pleasure exists most obviously in the tone. Houellebecq had a tone before he had his material. "Life is painful and disappointing" was the opening sentence of his first publication, and that was just a piece of literary criticism. He also early on had a "method," as he termed it explicitly in the subtitle to a second book, delivering an outline of rules for living as a poet, or a poète maudit. The essential rule was to turn pain into art.

Before he had written anything of note, in fact, Houellebecq revived an antique theory of writing: that any loss in life, understood in quantities of suffering, must be turned to a profit in art, measured in quantities of emotion. He truly believed this. The idea can be traced to the Romantic poets, or especially to nineteenth-century aestheticism, in the peculiar emotional-economic conversions we associate with Charles Baudelaire and many an anti-bourgeois poet.

Houellebecq's transforming insight was that the highest rate of return on pain could be achieved today without opposing the dominant values of society. Houellebecq's heroes would so nakedly accept and defend banal social practices that the practices would become unrecognizable, in fact offensive. And yet the heroes would still be compulsive failures: doggedly following the social forms, intelligently identifying their true meanings, yet unable to fall into the un-self-conscious pretention or true belief that alone could give any hope of success. Houellebecq rejected the aristocratic, anti-bourgeois "outsider," the "rebel." Instead, he would dream up middle-class protagonists who became inside-outsiders, rebels because of the contradictory quality of their naïve conformity.

This stood out most in the emotional power Houellebecq got from a way of over-accepting the elements of everyday life. Monoprix does not make a take-home dinner so that you can meditate on it. Prepared foods do not exist for you to dwell, as Houellebecq does, on the feelings of isolation produced in you by frozen coq au vin-as you then accede to commercial values, dizzying yourself in willful praise of frozen permanence, asepsis, and convenience. The marketing department does not want you to follow its cheerful advertising slogans with your own hysterical speeches of insolent opposition to all those who doubt the value of the take-home dinner, all those malefactors who say it is better to cook from scratch, to eat "natural foods," or to share dinner with company. In fact, the culture that stands behind the take-home dinner finds your praise odd, not to say disgusting-because that culture wants to believe its conveniences are helping the old humane values, which Houellebecq praises it for circumventing. Houellebecq has managed to become a bad boy for both right and left, while shrugging, "Who, me? But I am only showing you what your culture wants!"

In Platform, then, Houellebecq can claim to be working out the deep logic of sexual markets. And worked out far enough, that logic should be freeing instead of enslaving. As Houellebecq always said, if sex is kept alongside the money economy, if it fosters individual competition for the most attractive, if it is confused with the promises of love, it will cause most people pain. If, on the other hand, a means is discovered of making sex available to all, by pushing it entirely into a money economy where it is affordable and disenchanted ("commoditized," in sales jargon), then you truly liberate people. In fact, Houellebecq goes so far as to suggest, with sex gotten out of the way, bought and paid for like a TV dinner, you reopen the possibility of love for people who have absolutely nothing special about them. Love is something different, which the market deadened but could not take over. It is an inviolate sphere, containing mothers, children, caring, puppy dogs, and cooking. Houellebecq has never denied being a sentimentalist.

YET THE SEXUAL argument seems oddly beside the point in the actual reading of Platform. The book is really about business. The sex scenes are dull and brutal. They become tolerable only when Michel makes a grandiloquent speech about his or Valérie's orgasms' role in the return of happiness to Europe. The real pleasure of the book revolves around Valérie's and Jean-Yves' company, their magic capitalism. It represents multinational business as similar to setting up a lemonade stand, and it's true, reading about it is like eating candy. By mid-book, we discover that we are turning pages mostly for the entrepreneurial project. This is also the significance of the kaleidoscopic tour through other narrative forms in the novel: the murder mystery, the travelogue and travel brochure, and the airport thriller (Houellebecq beats up particularly on John Grisham's The Firm). All are literatures that exist just for pleasure, for a pursuit that leads to gratification, and Houellebecq shows he can do them one better in a business plot within a literary novel.

There is something correct here about the way we fantasize. When you have no access to the means of creation, when you lack capital and social position, when you are versed as we all are in the rhetoric of commercial creation, when you have learned in the twenty-first century that whatever can be thought will be attempted for profit, then how could you not spend your best creative impulses in imagining new products to bring to market? We do, in fact, daydream clever advertisements, scripts for films, drug protocols, business ventures, or, for that matter, chains of erotic resorts-all of them beyond our power to develop. The insight of the novel is that capitalism can become our best private fantasy, even better than the violence, sex, personality, or intellect we think we read for.

For reasons that aren't easy to fathom, Muslims serve as the reality check to this dream. If the preceding is fantasy-sex and capitalism, true love and rationalized satisfactions-violent Muslims are, in Platform, the Law. Not infidel hordes, but forces of order, they are closest in spirit to Houellebecq's more familiar targets, leftist moralists. But they mark a turn away from the usual Western, systematic objects of his animosity.

To a degree, Houellebecq can be saluted for prescience. Platform appeared in France two weeks before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Thirteen months later, the al-Qaeda-linked explosion in a nightclub in Bali recalled Houellebecq's fictional Thailand massacre. Beyond this retrospective explanation, his choice of Muslims for spoilers seems arbitrary. It's true that Houellebecq has long thought of Islam basically in its connection to terrorism. In France, tensions surrounding the presence of Muslim populations in the working-class suburbs must be pertinent-especially the neighborhoods where the remainder of that generation-of-the-grandparents lives, with whom Houellebecq so strongly identifies in his sentimental moments (he was raised by his grandmother).

The effect of the climactic Muslim murderers in Platform is to remind us of the reality that in the middle of the book we manage to forget. They are, of course, a ridiculous deus ex machina. But we had managed to let go of all the necessary obstacles to international prostitution resorts, so badly did we want the business plan to work; we had ignored the verbal and legal attacks that would come in the real world, from governments, from feminists, from NGOs, from the media, and that we would launch ourselves. Houellebecq's style is not satire, it does not rely on far-off possibilities: it is ultra-realistic. The ridiculousness of the terrorists is, at best, a stab at our ridiculous will to give ourselves up to an impossible plot.

His Muslims can't only be a formal device though, and they suggest a fatal misuse of the prime Houellebecqian technique-the exposure of the logic of institutions (here, radical Islam) by taking over their supposed rules. There is an easy-to-miss passage at the beginning of the book, when Michel describes facing his father's Muslim murderer. Michel begins the encounter in a spirit of placid indifference (he didn't even like his father). Then comes a turn:


The curious thing about this passage, and the early pages surrounding it, is that they suggest that Michel's ability to hate comes from learning an imagined role from Muslims. "According to his brutal view of the world, I had a right to vengeance": it is as if Michel gains his emotion from the discovery of an expectation, a code, and he makes himself discern an invitation to make the mood his own. Society wouldn't approve of this-one "naturally" hates a father's killer, one doesn't work it up-any more than it does Houellebecq's adoption of the values of consumer goods or paid-for sex.

To pick a party outside the West as your new source of energy, to let a fantasy Muslim teach you to feel justified in retribution and "vengeance," is to flirt with intellectual collapse. When Houellebecq's approach produces insight, it's because of a certain hidden, systematic character he is able to reveal from the inside, in institutions that are meaningfully his own. He is a dialectical clown, who finds menace in benevolent institutions and opportunities for deliberate misappropriation in the malignant. This is Houellebecq at his best. But dialecticians risk making their inversions of thought mechanical. The outcomes are not thought through. Houellebecq pays the price then, for creating himself as one of the most exciting writers in Europe today, in the suspicion that parts of Platform were not written by his brain, which is very fine, but by his persona, which marches on without him.


Mark Greif is a senior correspondent at The American Prospect.

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