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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1998, I was one of the judges of the Prix Novembre, in Paris: a prize given, as its name implies, late in the literary season. After the Goncourt had got it wrong, and after stumblebum efforts by other prizes to correct the Goncourt's errors, the Prix Novembre would issue a final, authoritative verdict on the year. It was unusual for a French prize in having a (slowly) rotating jury, foreign judges--Mario Vargas Llosa was also there--and serious money attached: about thirty thousand dollars for the winner.
That year, the major prizes had all failed to honor Michel Houellebecq's "Les Particules Elementaires," and for months le cas Houellebecq had been simmering. Schoolteachers had protested the book's explicit sexuality; the author had been expelled from his own literary-philosophical group for intellectual heresy. Nor was it just the book that provoked. One female member of our jury declared that she had admired the novel until she watched its author on television. The Maecenas of the prize, a businessman whose interventions the previous year had been very low-key, made a lengthy and impassioned attack on Houellebecq. He seemed, at the least, to be indicating where he didn't want his money to go.
In the course of a rather tense discussion, it was Vargas Llosa who came up with the best description of "Les Particules Elementaires": "insolent." He meant it, naturally, as a term of praise. There are certain books--sardonic and acutely pessimistic--that systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous. Voltaire's "Candide" might be taken as the perfect example of literary insolence. In a different way, La Rochefoucauld is deeply insolent; so is Beckett, bleakly, and Roth, exuberantly. The book of insolence finds its targets in such concepts as a purposeful God, a benevolent and orderly universe, human altruism, the existence of free will.
Houellebecq's novel--his second--was very French in its mixture of intellectuality and eroticism; it was reminiscent of Tournier in the evident pride it took in its own theoretical bone structure. It also had its faults: a certain heavy-handedness, and a tendency for the characters to make speeches rather than utter dialogue. But, in its high ambition and its intransigence, it was clearly superior to the other immediate contender for the prize, a novel that was very French in a different way: elegant, controlled, and old-fashioned--or, rather, classique, as I learned to say in judges' jargon.
Houellebecq squeaked it by a single vote. Afterward, I was talking to the president of the jury, the writer and journalist Daniel Schneidermann, about the fuss our winner had kicked up in the press and on television. Perhaps, I suggested, it was just that he wasn't mediatique--mediagenic. "On the contrary," Schneidermann (who had voted for Houellebecq) replied. "He's mediatique by being anti-mediatique. It's very clever." An hour or so later, in a gilded salon of the Hotel Bristol, before literary Paris's smartest, a shabby figure in a baggy sweater and rumpled scarlet jeans took his...
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