Slim and pretty Jed Martin has taken the art world by storm with a sequence of photographic artworks based on Michelin maps. During the next seven years, he creates 42 paintings in his Series of Simple Professions. Then, in 18 months, Jed completes 22 masterpieces in the Series of Business Compositions, including his most famous work, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology. Then one last definitive portrait--Michel Houellebecq, Writer--rocks the art world, only to be stolen.
You're hardly 10 pages into this Prix Goncourt-winning novel by the notorious bad boy of French letters before Jed considers hiring to write his art catalogue none other than the novelist Michel Houellebecq, "...a good author... pleasant to read..." with "an accurate view of society." No one enjoys the pyrotechnics of fiction like the French, and Houellebecq gleefully depicts himself as a depressed, solitary, tobacco-dependent, financially needy divorcee, a drunken eccentric hated and scorned by the media, a misanthropic loner who spends most of his days in bed, no longer feeling anything but "a faint sense of solidarity with the human species."
The story begins in flashback, with Jed Martin as a child first delighting in drawing flowers with colored pencils. Then, one day in a service station, Jed looks at a Michelin map, and falls in love. He buys more than 150 of them. His first solo exhibition of photographs of maps is titled "The Map Is More Interesting Than the Territory." We meet his press officer, his gallerist, his beautiful Russian lover. His story unfolds like a piece of music, each of the three parts a separate movement: Part One is the education of the artist, Part Two is the encounter between two solitary geniuses, and Part Three becomes a brutal murder mystery when one of the main characters is found viciously dismembered, decapitated along with his dog.
Just like in a novel by Sartre, these intellectual French characters love, above all else, to talk, talk, talk. They've got intense opinions on everything from sausage-making to Picasso, casually dropping bon mots like "Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave," and discussing the benefits of asubha, where meditators focus on a decomposing corpse.
Some authors--Genet comes to mind--in spite of literary brilliance, aren't at their best telling stories, they lose patience, and just quit on you. Add Houellebecq to the list. His description of the painting of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is a literary tour-de-force, profound in its implications and genuinely touching, right down to the fire in Jobs's eyes, which he compares to the mad inventors in Jules Verne's works. But the novel simply never recovers from the brutal dismemberment that explodes the plot at the beginning of Part Three, which is not to deny that Houellebecq has some staggering pluses. At his best, he sees clearly straight into the very heart of our capitalist corporate planet, and has the skill to weave his insights into literature. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: The Prix Goncourt-winning life of an artist bucking the trends of the French art world until a brutal murder leaves his life in pieces, and his masterpiece stolen.