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A review by floodingfloods
Platform by Michel Houellebecq
1.0
After an at least somewhat interesting character examination in the opening forty pages or so, Platform slips quickly into a frustrating, offensive and, often, incredibly boring dirge.
For a novel centred on the sex industry, the actual sex scenes here, though predictably frequent, are for the most part uninteresting and formulaic: description of erection, description of Valerie's (occasionally another's) "pussy", verb of choice ("entered" or "penetrated", usually), an indication of who came. Perhaps surprisingly for such a shock jock, the author's sexual fantasies seem to begin and end with the three-way).
Houllebecq, despite taking us to Thai massage parlours, BDSM sex dungeons and tryst clubs, very rarely moves the plot anywhere interesting. Large parts of the middle section are devoted to the details of business acquisition. By the time the plot begins to roll along again - having bland missionary sex for the third time in a chapter doesn't count as "plot" - we're at the end of Part Two, which - well, tries to do something important although I'm not exactly sure what. It's an abrupt change of pace for sure, but whether the author is trying to make some sort of profound political point, etch out some satirical message or just shock the reader to attention is unclear. In any case, he achieves none of this.
What's more, the reader can't help but feel that there's more than a touch of the author's ego transposed into the Main Character (both author and character are named Michel, of course) through his philosophical-sounding but ultimately empty theses on quote unquote deep issues, his unabashed sexual prowess (count the number of times Valerie inexplicably climaxes within seconds) and above all the commitment to the tired heteronormative fantasy of the ugly old man fucking the hot young girl. There's a nauseating amount of self-worship here which doesn't make the MC's detestable qualities - his sexism, racism, homophobia - any easier to swallow. His frequent monologues deriding Islam and its followers are, presumably, meant to come across as the learned pronouncements of an iconoclastic pariah but instead show themselves as the racist rants of a thinly-written pseudo-intellectual.
Perhaps that's a good way to describe Houllebecq's writing more generally.
For a novel centred on the sex industry, the actual sex scenes here, though predictably frequent, are for the most part uninteresting and formulaic: description of erection, description of Valerie's (occasionally another's) "pussy", verb of choice ("entered" or "penetrated", usually), an indication of who came. Perhaps surprisingly for such a shock jock, the author's sexual fantasies seem to begin and end with the three-way).
Houllebecq, despite taking us to Thai massage parlours, BDSM sex dungeons and tryst clubs, very rarely moves the plot anywhere interesting. Large parts of the middle section are devoted to the details of business acquisition. By the time the plot begins to roll along again - having bland missionary sex for the third time in a chapter doesn't count as "plot" - we're at the end of Part Two, which - well, tries to do something important although I'm not exactly sure what. It's an abrupt change of pace for sure, but whether the author is trying to make some sort of profound political point, etch out some satirical message or just shock the reader to attention is unclear. In any case, he achieves none of this.
What's more, the reader can't help but feel that there's more than a touch of the author's ego transposed into the Main Character (both author and character are named Michel, of course) through his philosophical-sounding but ultimately empty theses on quote unquote deep issues, his unabashed sexual prowess (count the number of times Valerie inexplicably climaxes within seconds) and above all the commitment to the tired heteronormative fantasy of the ugly old man fucking the hot young girl. There's a nauseating amount of self-worship here which doesn't make the MC's detestable qualities - his sexism, racism, homophobia - any easier to swallow. His frequent monologues deriding Islam and its followers are, presumably, meant to come across as the learned pronouncements of an iconoclastic pariah but instead show themselves as the racist rants of a thinly-written pseudo-intellectual.
Perhaps that's a good way to describe Houllebecq's writing more generally.