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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Nihilists Have Feelings, Too: Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory
A "sick old turtle" named Michel Houellebecq appears in Michel Houellebecq's new novel, The Map and the Territory. Drawing by Bill Morris
Few living writers have generated as much snark as Michel Houellebecq. Of all the rivers of bile that this dyspeptic bad boy of French letters has inspired, here is my absolute favorite sentence: "Like Haruki Murakami – in some ways his gentler (and far more gifted) Japanese counterpart – Houellebecq writes about the sulky crises of middle-aged male protagonists confronting existential superfluity while dealing with the destabilizing presence of alternately willing and withholding nubiles."
Anyone who can keep a straight face while writing such a sentence – especially the bit about the destabilizing influence of alternately willing and withholding nubiles – is a writer you simply cannot ignore. So meet Rob Horning, who wrote the above for the on-line magazine The New Inquiry, in his review of a new book called Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism by Ben Jeffery. Horning gives a full inventory of what he finds offensive about Houellebecq's fiction: its self-loathing, misanthropy, pessimism, cynicism, and hopelessness in the face of a life that is pointless and only made moreso by the hollow seductions of sex and consumer capitalism. "Houellebecq’s indiscriminate cynicism is not especially hard to get a handle on," Horning writes. "He seems to operate on the assumption that the more mercilessly pessimistic or debasing an observation, the more titillatingly truthful readers will take it to be. He yearns to sound transgressive but more often than not comes across as petty and self-parodic."
Horning bases this verdict largely on three of Houellebecq's fictional gloomfests, The Elementary Particles (1998), Platform (2002), and The Possibility of an Island (2006). That's a shame, because since then Houellebecq has published two books – a collection of correspondence with Bernard-Henri Levy called Public Enemies, and a new novel called The Map and the Territory – that reveal something Horning would likely find impossible to believe.
Namely: Michel Houellebecq may be a petty misanthrope and an average prose stylist, but he can also be drop-dead funny.
Here he is writing to his pen pal BHL in Public Enemies: "We are both rather contemptible individuals...basically I'm just a redneck, an unremarkable author with no style...a nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist." After pleading guilty as charged, Houellebecq points out that nihilists have feelings too: "The fact remains that I am uncomfortable and helpless in the face of outright hostility. Every time I did one of those famous Google searches, I had the same feeling as, when suffering from a particularly painful bout of eczema, I end up scratching myself until I bleed... In the end I stopped counting my enemies although, in spite of my doctor's repeated advice, I still haven't given up scratching."
Granted, this isn't exactly thigh-slapping material, but the Gallic wit is undeniable, as is the refreshingly gentle air of self-deprecation. These virtues are the centerpiece of The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq's least violent and most tender novel, winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt.
The book opens with a contemporary French artist named Jed Martin struggling to finish a painting he calls Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. Here's Houellebecq's take on the art world's two reigning superstars: Koons had the slippery appearance of "a Chevrolet convertible salesman," while "Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an 'I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash' kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death..." This deft lampoon of the art world is marred by those random italics, a pointless stylistic tic that will recur, maddeningly, on every page.
The novel's brashest and best gag is the introduction of a character named Michel Houellebecq, the famous French writer, who Jed enlists to write the catalog copy for his break-out exhibition, a series of altered photographs of Michelin road maps that give the novel its title. The author describes this Houellebecq character as "a sick old turtle," a "tortured wreck," and "a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies: it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog."
The novel is most alive when we're in the presence of Houellebecq, who loathes his native France so much that he has moved into a "banal" bungalow on the west coast of Ireland, where he putters around amid unpacked boxes, fretting, not getting much writing done. When Jed visits him there, a spark ignites between the two and the story begins to sing. Jed confesses that he expected the novelist to drink more than he does, and Houllebecq pounces on this opportunity to unload on some of his eczema-inducing enemies: "You know, it's the journalists who've given me the reputation for being a drunk; what's curious is that none of them ever realized that if I was drinking a lot in their presence, it was simply in order to put up with them. How could you bear to have a conversation with a twat like Jean-Paul Marsouin without being almost shit-faced? How could you meet someone who works for Marianne or Le Parisien libere without wanting to throw up on the spot?"
This has the ring of dark truth and it's fun to read and I don't doubt that it was fun to write. Unfortunately, there's entirely too little of it, and the fun comes to an abrupt end when Houellebecq returns to France, buys the rural house he grew up in, and gets brutally murdered there.
There are only two nubiles in the book, both of the willing persuasion and both doomed to disappear without a trace, a fate common to many of Houellebecq's characters. Much more interesting is the presence of a middle-aged woman named Helene, who is attractive, sexy, and happily married to Jasselin, the lead police investigator in the Houellebecq murder case. But this is an author who can't stand prosperity. Soon after shocking us with a grisly murder and introducing us to this intriguing married couple, Houellebecq wanders off on a wheezing disquisition on the history, temperament, and health complications of their bichon dog ("the introduction of the Bolognese bichon to the court of Francois I came as a present from the duke of Ferrara..."). Such disregard for the reader goes beyond cynical; it's vicious. And it has all the poetry of a Wikipedia entry. In fact, after weathering charges that he'd copied entire passages of the novel from the online encyclopedia, Houellebecq has added an acknowledgement in the American edition, thanking Wikipedia for being a "source of inspiration."
Houellebecq has been compared, not unfairly, to everyone from Camus to Celine, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Manson. If I read him correctly, his lack of artistry is a conscious indictment of artistry, of prettiness, of writers bowing to readers who yearn for such cheap niceties as fluent prose, shapely narratives, and three-dimensional characters. Such things are both beneath Houellebecq's contempt and beyond his powers, which is lucky for him. His stance means he's free to demean something he's incapable of producing. Nifty.
Which is not to say this is a wholly bad book. It's full of clunky writing, but it has a few interesting ideas and engaging moments, some actual suspense, and a delightfully twisted sense of humor. That's not nothing. And any writer who can call himself a "sick old turtle" and serve us his own severed head – well, that's a writer you simply cannot ignore.
The Contemptibles and the Tapeworms: Houellebecq and BHL Correspond
Public Enemies is the record of twenty-eight letters Bernard-Henri Levy, the French intellectual, and Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist, exchanged between January and July of 2008. The letters are precisely dated, and a few of them contain salutations, but they otherwise bear little resemblance to the kind of letters you or I might write. There is no gossip. There is no weather. There is no talk of lovers or travel plans or works-in-progress, and scant talk of friends. Sarkozy comes up once—and then twice more when they discuss why, after all, it was better not to have brought him up more often. At one point Houellebecq actually apologizes for not being vaguer: “Okay, I’m sorry for reducing the issue to the specific, but there are some questions on which I tend to think pragmatically, though I’m embarrassed to admit it." He doesn’t need to apologize again.
Because they leave out so much, the letters do not feel, so to speak, lived in, and reading them one begins to miss the sociable white noise of life’s minor goings-on. Correspondence is not really the right word for Public Enemies. Nor is it, as the promotional material would suggest, the literary answer to a prizefight; the correspondents mostly treat each other with kid gloves. Public Enemies belongs instead to a genre both odder and more arid, an undisciplined hybrid of memoir, literary criticism, and apercu, all composed in a key of complaint. “Someone has a little bile, a little sad passion they need to vent?” Houellebecq says. “Well, there are people you can dump on; Bernard-Henri, for example. And Houellebecq, yeah, not bad, a lot of people are dumping on him these days." “In the end it all adds up,” Levy says, “and I can assure you that it outweighs the pile of shit that our enemies would like to bury us under." Indeed, Public Enemies is a book much preoccupied with dumping and shit-piles and parasites, “the microparasites who can—literally—no longer survive without me." Levy and Houellebecq hold these microparasites—their critics—in contempt. But as Houellebecq himself asks, “how effective is contempt when you are attacked by a tapeworm?" Strange to say, the tapeworm question haunts the book, and gives a measure of its limitations.
Bernard-Henri Levy, who goes by BHL, is the author of several books of philosophical nonfiction and a novel. He has made a name for himself as an intrepid humanitarian who invokes the wisdom of people like Jacques Derrida in reports from places like Darfur. BHL, who is married to an actress with a famous family, is also the kind of humanitarian whose brand of pomade distracts attention from his advocacy work. (A journalist once summed up his philosophy as “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”) For many in France, he is the personification of champagne socialism, a wealthy and glamorous man who sermonizes to the educated classes on the insignificance of wealth and glamour. Houellebecq has different problems. A former civil servant, he approves of Sarkozy, smokes four packs a day, and lives in rural Ireland. “I am about as ill adapted as it is possible to be for a public role," he declares toward the end of Public Enemies. Houellebecq is the most famous novelist in France—last year’s La Carte et le Territoire won the Prix Goncourt—yet he is perhaps less well known for his novels than his causticity on the subjects of sex and Islam. This causticity informs the novels but is not confined to them. In a 2001 interview Houellebecq called Islam “the stupidest religion” and was charged with incitement of religious hatred; he was later acquitted in court. As for women, his “reputation for getting drunk and making passes at his female interviewers” is widespread enough to have warranted nervous mention in the introduction to his recent Paris Review interview (again, a false alarm: the interviewer described his actual conduct as “whimsical and charming”).
So both men have image problems. As BHL says midway through the book:
You could bring all the legal actions you wanted and for some people you’d still be only a nauseating matricidal killer, a racist and an Islamophobe. I could attempt to set the record straight in every possible and conceivable way and I would only strengthen their case that I’m a bourgeois bastard who knows nothing about social questions and takes an interest in the world’s disowned only in order to promote himself . . . It’s your reputation that’s your destiny.
BHL and Houellebecq were not close when they began writing one another. It does not seem that correspondence brought them significantly closer. As Houellebecq puts it in the opening letter, “We have, as they say, nothing in common—except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals." Contemptibility is an unconventional foundation for friendship, and indeed these letters are no friendship-building exercise. What they are is hard to say. The agreed-upon purpose of the correspondence is to investigate the ill will its authors have aroused worldwide. This conceals, thinly, a great project of the ego, which is for Houellebecq and BHL to place themselves in the same category as France’s illustrious public enemies past: Voltaire, Baudelaire, Flaubert.
But BHL is no Baudelaire, and this agenda, thankfully, is not adhered to. In fact they pursue it so slackly and distractibly that it quickly recedes into the background, to be overtaken by other, stranger dramas. The book is better for this. Some readers will be stirred by the discovery that BHL considers his “ego” “fireproof, shatterproof," and that he likes to make love in a state of lucid wakefulness, whereas Houellebecq prefers to be a little out of it—to do it in “the early hours, half asleep." Others (all, perhaps) will be amused by the sheer Frenchness of BHL’s claim that only writing and love (“and I mean that in the strict sense, in the sense of loving women”) make life worth it: “Why do you write? Because you can’t make love all day. Why do you make love? Because you can’t write all day." Yet these indiscretions, bite-sized and obvious, are not nearly the most interesting things in the book. Aside from the menace of the press, the two cannot touch a subject without sparking into disagreement, and they do it with entertaining regularity in Public Enemies. Though they range over much (metaphysics, aesthetics, reasons for writing, reasons for being), politics, predictably, is the only topic to tinge the letters with incivility. BHL, a humanitarian, definitionally believes in basic human dignity. Houellebecq, who is a quietist, doesn’t. He recommends a “bacterial” view of humanity, and goes so far as to wonder if the species wouldn’t be better off expunged. Houellebecq thinks the fundamental phenomenon of life is irreversibility, “the absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay.” BHL thinks it’s love.
Their most interesting clash, however, has to do with style and self-presentation. Following the example of his self-made, solitary father, BHL has become, in his own account, a hardcore keeper of secrets. “I’m a real neurotic when it comes to secrecy,” he says. And soon after: “secrecy was as indispensable to me as the air I breathe.” At one point he actually scolds Houellebecq for “surpassing yourself when it comes to enormous, provocative confessions that will give the blabbermouths something to talk about.” Yet just as BHL is not a little bombastic about his “horror of bombast,” so he paradoxically effuses about his love of secrecy. Indeed, he blabbers on about it: “Without saying so, we all . . . dream of the ultimate mystification, the one that will render speechless those of our contemporaries who have been the least deceived and will allow us, poor clowns tired of our own comedies, to be reborn in a new guise, a new skin, another family novel, another novel period.”
It is difficult to tell whether this contradiction stems from lack of self-awareness or, more simply, the incoherence of bad writing. BHL is at least occasionally guilty of the latter. His metaphors, for instance, are so mixed and shambolic they read like parodies: “The shaft of light thrown by the work of words is the bright spot in the dark that finally nails down the idea.” Either way, Houellebecq, who declines to brag about his own elusiveness, is by far the harder of the two to get a read on. He is also the better writer. In these letters as in his novels, his prose displays the same blend of lassitude and lyricism, the same vexed sensitivity to modern life, and here as there it is a pleasure to read him. Houellebecq makes music out of scorn. He describes the “Soviet-style displays of enthusiasm by those in charge” of little poetry journals and, more stingingly still, the prose of another writer:
Everything about the man rings false, his every sentence oozes speciousness and affectation. The restrained emotion, the walks across the moors ‘lashed by the bitter wind’ . . . you feel like you’re in a BMW commercial
Scorn, however, is not Houellebecq’s best or only key. Here he is, with loopy splendor, on existence:
We are only passing through here on earth, I understand that perfectly now; we have no roots, we bear no fruit. In short, our mode of existence is different from that of trees. That said, I’m very fond of trees, in fact I’ve come to love them more and more; but I am not a tree. We are more like stones, cast into the void as free as they are; or if you absolutely insist in seeing the glass half full, we are a little like comets.
BHL is a game and expressive writer, and his activism seems sincere, but he strangely comes off as less serious, as buffoonish even, compared to Houellebecq. At any rate, it is Houellebecq that has the most memorable line in this odd, aggrieved, surprisingly entertaining little book: “If someone believes they know me, they are simply lacking information.”
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