Some authors are chameleons of style, evading any attempts at typifying their prose; others, meanwhile, speak to us with a distinct idiom, its characteristics honed over the corpus of their work. French author and full-time enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq clearly falls into the latter category, with a style that he has made distinctly his. Two typical examples from The Elementary Particles (2000) demonstrate: "Most of the women in the group jerked men off crudely; they had no technique. They gripped the cock too tightly and shook it frightfully, probably trying to imitate something they had seen in a porn film." And, just to make clear that his pen is not exclusively heteronormative: "While they talked, some massaged their genitals through nylon briefs, or slipped a finger under their waistbands, revealing pubic hair or the root of the penis. Desplechin had set up a telescope beside the bay window. Rumour had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a common or garden alcoholic."

Unmistakable and refined. Well, unmistakable anyway. Such explosions of anger and grotesquerie are at the heart of his work—and everywhere else in it too. The vulgar is his aesthetic: his novels are as soaked in it as his characters are in their own bodily fluids. But his novels are also very smart. He is a writer of ideas, brimming with thoughts and polemic, often blurring the line between the two, and reflecting upon the visceral repulsion he so skillfully creates. And so his highly visceral work—and in particular his fascinating new novel The Possibility of an Island —gives us the opportunity to make a comment on something that is inherently hard to intellectualize: the nature of the vulgar. Consciousness and vulgarity? Consciousness of vulgarity? The thought makes intellectuals uncomfortable because it shifts the vulgar onto their turf, but Houellebecq uses that discomfort to make incisive—and sometimes surprisingly tender—observations on the baseness of being human and the mechanisms we have for coping with and sometimes aggravating our own depravity.

Intellectuality aside, however, Houellebecq's vulgarity is often taken alone. As a result, he is often reviewed as a conversation piece and an overdone provocateur, a writer whose first chapters employ shock-and-awe but whose completed novels are blanket-bombing operations.

And yet there is something about his writing, or rather two things, that makes this judgment heavy-handed. The first, anyone can see, is his virtuosity. He achieves in his work a stunning combination of the perverse, the graphic and the judgmental—attacking everything he perceives to be empty and animal in our society, from the legacy of two centuries of materialist philosophy to the undeniable (and highly exploitable) fact that a man will do terrible things to get a blowjob. The second, which is much harder to explain, is the extraordinary sympathy that he evokes for the disgusting actors in his novelistic universe.

To begin, then, with reflections on the first. His work is unbearably precise when it comes to tagging the present state of the human condition—or at least vicious and thorough enough to hit the mark with some frequency. Sex tourism, sadomasochism, rape, objectification, rejection, the sham of New Age cults and the delusions of postmodern thinking all get their due in his scathing prose. But his attacks on the world we live in are charged enough ("common or garden alcoholic" is not the least devastating) to expose something even beyond societal decay. They depict human beings unable to escape their own latent barbarity, enmeshed in a cruelty that is partly an inescapable quality of global culture at the close of the second millennium and partly an inescapable quality of mankind.

Primeval and postmodern cruelty conjoin in his work. He stabs so deeply at everything materialistic and libertarian in our civilization that he threatens our idea of everything material and free as well. His attack on the horrifying consequences of humanism in a post-religious age rapidly becomes an attack on the human in all ages as well. His condemnation of the human moral condition runs deep enough—and close enough to the unavoidable, animalistic roots of our own cruelty—to condemn our very ontology as well.

Such is the case with his powerful new novel, The Possibility of an Island . It is the apex of this apocalyptic virtuosity. Houellebecq generates skillful layers of commentary over the present (sordid) circumstances of humanity. Encircling his apparently rampant vulgarity are harsher and harsher extrapolations of its consequences. How harsh does he get? "Apocalyptic" is not used figuratively here. The Possibility of an Island is a book about the final days of humanity—which, as it turns out, is the present day.

How do we know this? Houellebecq's method for illustrating Armageddon-in-action is surprisingly straightforward, if unorthodox. The autobiography of its main character is interspersed with hermeneutic commentary on his life by emotionless, autotrophic clones who will be created from his DNA millennia hence. They let us know that what Daniel is witnessing is in fact the beginning of the end for his race, which will be wiped out entirely in the coming centuries. Wiped out that is, except for bands of cruel, Planet-of-Apes-type savages who roam around the Earth raping each other. Houellebecq is consistent, whatever the millennium.

But the broad, sci-fi strokes of this work contain a certain subtlety. Between the base, genital-obsessed narrative and this futuristic fantasy are sophisticated layers of reflection, rendering precise the broad strokes sandwiching it on either end.

The base for these reflections is Daniel, the novel's main character, who is, at least before he becomes a super-human clone, a successful comedian entering his forties and the new millennium with millions of euros and a palatial summerhouse in Spain .

Behind him is a career built on the flaying of contemporary society: his sketches satirize consumerism, hippies, religious fundamentalism, terrorists, feminists, the mindlessness of modern culture, the general crassness of living. In his acerbic satires, the first of many layers of criticism and analysis emerges from Houellebecq's narration. They are crude commentaries on real life, in the domain of caricatures and dirty jokes—not without their value as a particularly twisted mirror on society, but too absorbed in the self-serving spectacle of their own cynical vulgarity to really say something substantial.

And yet, as Daniel observes, such heavy-handed satire is the closest most people get to ever examining themselves: "I was a cutting observer of contemporary reality," he quotes from a journalist ironically, "a lefty and a defender of human rights ...As for human rights, quite obviously I could give a toss; I could hardly manage to be interested in the rights of my cock."

Another level of commentary emerges. Daniel's sweeping judgments of the humanity he despises are still vulgar—that is, too broadly colored, too cynical to speak profoundly—but they are slightly more precise than the jokes he makes to earn money.

Despite his awareness and intelligence, however, Daniel cannot avoid falling prey to the things he skewers. He buys fancy cars, appears on the cover of rap magazines, spends his days fantasizing about the adolescent girls that appear on the front-cover of the teeny-bopper magazine his wife edits. And he grows old. His body grows weak, his impulse to love fluctuates, his sex-drive wanes, his balls sag.

And so, yet another layer of commentary is built into the book, this time integrated into the nature of mortality. Time, and the observers who act as its voice, becomes another observer of our vulgarity. Seen over time, this filth speaks suddenly to the weakness of the human condition. Daniel is a sellout, he is flaccid, he is a pushover when it comes to women. The judgment here is a subtler one. Houellebecq's characters are still pathetic, but now, as we see them grow old and helpless, their sordid, sagging traits become strangely sympathetic.

Still further voices emerge over this one, presenting a tapestry of insights on the animal within human nature. We are privy, for example, to the strangely provocative pronouncements of Vincent, the leader of another New Age cult, bent on achieving immortality through cloning. Then, subsequently, Houellebecq's combination of mysticism and genetics makes its own judgment on the physical nature of mortality and its metaphysical consequences. And so, layer upon layer of evaluation builds up around Houellebecq's initial, animalistic rendering of humanity, right up to the frighteningly pallid musings of clones Daniel24 and Daniel25. Here is the complexity of civilization—its layers of ideas, its pooling of intellects—endlessly reflecting and judging the animal within us.

The final commentator in this system, of course, is the reader, who is invited to experience the same disgust, cynicism or indifference that have been expressed in infinite variations by each layer of judgment. Say what you will—"it's been done;" "it shouldn't be done;" "it's overdone"—Houellebecq has already said it about his work in his work.

And herein, I think, lies the key to the elusive sympathy that is the second and more important reason why Michel Houellebecq is an extraordinary writer. We—the human community living comfortably in the West at the turn of the 21 st century—are the object that The Possibility of an Island so cruelly deconstructs and digests. And it does so with our own fangs. We have laughed at Daniel's comedies and hypocritically been critical of them, we have been horrified by the idea of age and pretended to embrace it, humbled by the prospect of death even as we make an effort to live life to its existential fullest. We have been both disenchanted and seduced by the world—and then criticized for being both. Houellebecq's horrifying intersubjectivity reminds us how vulnerable we are to the exact mirror of that process.

So, when any moment of tenderness or respect for humanity appears in Houellebecq's sordid spectacle—and there are a surprising number—we cling to it as if for dear life. The unbounded love with which Daniel touches his dog is enough to bring tears to your eyes not in spite of the fact that he has just humiliated his wife and then gone and spied on naked girls lying on the beach, but because of that fact. Because no matter how pathetically involved or how cruelly detached we are from life, we can still feel the pain and the love that burn together in the act of living.

The nature of vulgarity, then, is far from vulgar in Houellebecq's work—and, indeed, if there's anything his novels offer, it is a fascinating understanding of the complex function of the crass in our existence. Vulgarity is savage, but it allows us to realize that the convictions and cynicisms that supposedly restrain our vulgarity can be equally as cruel, only more insidiously, intellectually. The Possibility of an Island is not a perfect novel by any means—the interweaving stories are too heavily divorced by the apocalyptic divide between each successive chapter, and the fantastical element of the work is nowhere near as subtly handled as in Houellebecq's earlier novels, The Elementary Particles chiefly among them. But the message it communicates is not perfect either. It is necessarily disjointed, simultaneously full of despair and hope for humanity. The vulgarity that is its mechanism articulates the sadness of reality and the horror of our nightmares; but delineated by contrast, Houellebecq points also to the tenderness of our dreams. As a result, his is a message that, I might hazard to say, makes a courageous stab at saying something genuine by never permitting itself to settle for something false.

Oscar Wilde once observed that nineteenth-century society had a paradoxical hatred of both realism and romanticism—the rage of Caliban seeing and then not seeing his reflection in a mirror, respectively. Let us at least acknowledge, in the twenty-first century, the courage of an author like Houellebecq who attempts to transcend that unavoidable dismissal by confronting both—with the horror, love, clarity and confusion that both engender individually, to say nothing of together.

 

Matthew Spellberg really wishes he were a duck.