On Houellebecq

Anyway, this all gets at the more trenchant and interesting criticism levied at Houellebecq’s work, the criticism that embittered literary critics and unpublished no-name bloggers (i.e. me) like to pull out when we’re trying to take an Establishment Writer down a few notches — his prose just isn’t that beautiful. There’s not much description of the natural world, not much physicality (but somehow tons of sex), not much good dialogue, and far too many sidebars about abstractions like ‘liberalism’ and ‘secularization.’ Literary critics have devised a euphemism — ‘flat’ — to describe this style, which they seem to consider both the triumphant choice of dullness by a writer who could, if he so decided, write beautifully, and a stylistic catastrophe, the cheap parroting of instruction manual or Wikipedia-style prose.