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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote

Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | Christopher Buckley | Daphne Du Maurier | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | Bernard Malamud | VS Naipaul | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut

I've already read and enjoyed professional misanthrope Michel Houellebecq's two newest novels, The Possibility of an Island and Submission, so that made it only natural to add him to my Completist Challenge after recently being reminded of him (specifically, because of a recent article in the New York Times, about how the sexual politics Houellebecq foretold in his early novels seems to be eerily coming true in an age of meninists, GamerGate and incels), especially enticing here because Houellebecq has only published six novels over the course of his career, making it easier than normal to get him checked off my list and done for good.

Like many of the authors in this challenge, Houellebecq seems to have started out rather inauspiciously with his first book, 1994's Whatever (first published in English in 1998), a much simpler and more inconsequential story than the absurdist sagas he would become known for later in his career. It's the tale of one of those sour, unpleasant autistic sociopaths in your company's IT department who you always dread dealing with, the one time every three months he's forced to crawl out from his basement hole and help you ("Did you try turning it off and back on again? God!!!!!"); narrated in his voice, it's ostensibly a ho-hum record of his aggressively uninteresting life, but through throwaway comments it slyly paints a portrait of white male entitlement, obsessive hatred of women and sex, and barely contained homicidal rage that lies at the heart of our seemingly milquetoast narrator.

It's easy to see with this book why so many academic intellectuals were attracted to Houellebecq when he first started publishing (this book was often compared to Camus' The Stranger when it first came out); because here in his first novel Houellebecq still has a kind of emotional distance from his narrator and and doesn't declare a judgement of his actions, making it a more traditional kind of character portrait that lets readers assume that the author means for us to have some disdain for this deeply flawed protagonist. It wasn't until later novels that Houellebecq made it explicit that he agrees 100 percent with the opinions of his repulsive narrators, and sees these kinds of 4chan trolls and school shooters as the true unsung heroes of our dirty, corrupted society, about as close to pure nihilism as a contemporary artist gets who is still managing to crank out commercial bestsellers. (Well, and filmmaker Michael Haneke as well.)

That makes Houellebecq troubling as a popular author, because he's essentially not only holding up a dark mirror to society, but also gleefully declaring that the sexist, racist, murderous monster you see in the reflection is a much better human being than you, because at least they're pure in their convictions and actually follow through on their hatred, while the most you can manage is to post some snotty tweets about how much Donald Trump sucks. If you were really a person worth admiring, Houellebecq's increasingly outrageous novels claim, you would've already stormed the White House with your assault rifle; and the fact that you haven't means your opinion is worthless about his tales of the people who have. This message gets clearer and clearer with each subsequent book Houellebecq has written; but it's all right there in Whatever as well, just sublimated enough that many at the time mistakenly thought he was a good little liberal who was criticizing such behavior. Spoiler alert: HE WASN'T.

Next up: The joy train keeps chugging along with 1998's The Elementary Particles, about a man who has devoted his life to pioneering work in cloning, specifically so that the human race will never again have to deal with sex or love in order to keep propagating the species. Good times!