Platform

Both of the novels I've read by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised and this one, contain a lot of sex. "Serious" novelists are notorious for being unable to write a sex scene -- Updike's stuff, of which I've only seen excerpts, comes to mind -- because of the danger of unintentional hilarity, among other things. Houellebecq's sex scenes are entirely matter-of-fact, graphic, slightly pornographic, and yet utterly serious. He also sprinkes through the text philosophical aphorisms and disquisitions on culture, religion, and politics. His tone is slightly bemused, world-weary, and frank. The whole effect is enormously entertaining.

An example: "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing." Or: "It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable." No one I know of is writing with this energy in English, except maybe Geoff Dyer.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

I wonder what the chances would be of "A Day's Wait," one of the stories in this volume, being published today in, say, Harper's were it submitted by an unknown. I would estimate them to be close to zero. What has always struck me about Hemingway is his combination of directness and strangeness. The sentences are mostly simple, but the combination of words is sometimes odd, and the occasional mannered speech serves to heighten and intensify reality. I neglected Hemingway when I should have read him, in school, but it is rewarding to find him in middle age.

Miss Lonelyhearts

It must have been a relief for writers like West and Faulkner (Sanctuary came out around this time) to publish books examining society's lurid and depraved aspects and have them treated (at least by some) as literature and not smut. Miss Lonelyhearts, the story of a newspaper advice columnist, reads a bit showoffy with its mannered dialogue and overheated religious aspects, but there are acute observations worth mining throughout. As in this passage: "Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio, and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this was the worst."

Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich's account of her experiences doing low-wage work was published in 2001, and it seems almost quaint today to complain about jobs that actually exist. The book is a useful snapshot, but it would have been interesting had Ehrenreich asked even a single co-worker if she was aware of the one thing that no ugly boss or lousy landlord could ever take away, namely, education.

The Day of the Locust

It cannot have been difficult to find enough sordidness to fill a novel about 1930s Hollywood, but Nathanael West manages to cover all the bases -- stardom, whoredom, alcoholism, fanaticism -- in a neat and artful package. There is black humor as well, as when starlet Faye Greener says of her father: " 'He's crazy. We Greeners are all crazy.' She made this last statement as though there were merit in being crazy. 'He's pretty sick,' Homer said, apologizing for her. 'Maybe he had a sunstroke.' 'No, he's crazy.' " The set pieces, including a cockfight, drunken party, and the climactic film premiere, are carried off with skill. The book was also made into a fine film in 1975 directed by John Schlesinger.

Atomised

After reading two restrained novels from northern Europe that moved at a microscopic pace in addressing microscopic, interior issues, Michel Houellebecq's Atomised arrives as a full-force gale of filth, humor, science, sociology, and psychology. The author's audacity in tackling everything from quantum physics to the sexual revolution in telling the story of two half-brothers -- one a scientist, the other a failed hedonist -- is rare in a world of cautious introspection and irony. Here, happily, is a novelist bold enough to provoke fights, and hatred.

The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker's novel is endurable, just, because of its coolness. But I despair at his need, like Per Petterson's, to write in the first person and at his numbing catalog of activities: I milked the cows, I looked at the canal, I mended the fence, I made coffee, I tore up a letter, I took food to father, and so on, and on. The germ of the story, about a surviving twin, is interesting enough, but the canvas is stretched past the breaking point.