As an author, putting yourself in the middle of the action is no idle gesture—you obviously have some sort of point to make. Some novelists do it to erase the comfortable distance between creator and subject.
All novelists inject themselves into their work, whether by fictionalizing some telling episodes from their lives or in supplying the thoughts and gestures that humanize their characters. But it takes a writer with chutzpah to literally put himself in the story—that demands a special mixture of courage and self-regard, which Michel Houellebecq has in spades.
The French author of Platform and The Elementary Particles is one of the most fearless and hated figures in modern letters. His novels deal with unsavoury topics like sex tourism, human cloning and religious cults, and are filled with contemptible characters, gratuitous yet joyless sex and a withering view of mankind. I happen to enjoy his icy tone and utter lack of sentimentality—it produces some shrewd insights, as well as cutting humour. Off the page, Houellebecq conducts himself with devilish insouciance, regaling interviewers with caustic quips—like the time he called Islam “violent” and “the stupidest of all religions.”
In his new book, The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq introduces us to Jed Martin, a moderately successful French artist. Like all Houellebecq protagonists, Jed is socially inept and casually misanthropic. (Here’s a taste: “Jed no longer remembered when he had first begun to draw. No doubt all children draw, more or less, but as he didn’t know any children, he wasn’t sure.”). To stoke interest in his upcoming exhibition, Jed’s publicist coaxes him into hiring the controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq to write the introduction to the program. The author’s input has the desired effect: The exhibition is well-attended, and turns Jed into a multimillionaire. The outcome for “Houellebecq” is less favourable.
As an author, putting yourself in the middle of the action is no idle gesture—you obviously have some sort of point to make. Some novelists do it to erase the comfortable distance between creator and subject. For example, in his 1973 novel Crash, about a group of deviants who get a sexual charge out of automobile accidents, British author J.G. Ballard named the main character “James Ballard,” ostensibly to implicate himself—and, by extension, the reader—in the fetishization of cars. More often, novelists do it for the sake of self-parody, like Gary Shteyngart in his 2006 novel Absurdistan, a post-Soviet farce that features as a secondary character a lecherous American writer named Jerry Shteynfarb.
This kind of stunt-casting can be cheeky fun. It’s part of that postmodernist impulse to break down the fourth wall, while exploiting our fascination with memoirs. A fine example of this is Lunar Park, the under-appreciated 2005 novel by Bret Easton Ellis (who happens to be one of Houellebecq’s acknowledged influences). In it, we meet the author a decade and a half after he published his most notorious book, American Psycho. His days of provocation and hard partying largely over, “Bret Easton Ellis” has settled into a comfortable domesticity in New York state, with a wife and two children. But eerie things start to happen—young boys in the area go missing and his daughter’s toy bird seems possessed. Most disturbing of all, “Ellis” becomes convinced that he’s being stalked by his most dastardly creation: Patrick Bateman, a.k.a. the American Psycho.
Lunar Park is a complex and clever work—a family drama, a supernatural thriller and an experiment in metafiction. Ellis spends the first half of the novel exploring his reservations about his career, his ambivalence about his father’s death and his general anxiety post-9/11. The book has the emotional honesty of a good autobiography—that is, until Ellis starts twisting the narrative to suggest that it might not be that autobiographical after all. What begins as a confessional morphs into a serpentine spoof of one.
Like Ellis, Houellebecq can’t resist the urge to tease the reader. In The Map and the Territory, he presents himself as a grungy, self-pitying loner given to nihilistic rants whose only earthly comfort seems to be his dog. But Houellebecq isn’t satisfied with character assassination; he has to martyr himself. “Houellebecq” is later found dead, the victim of a sadistic killer, which seems to me like the author’s way of taunting his critics by indulging their most sinister fantasies. Starring in your own novel can be an entertaining ego trip, but rarely does it result in any prolonged soul-searching.
