December 10–17, 1998

book quarterly

Troubletown

Two men caught in a web of paranoia.

Reviewed by Justin Bauer

Louse

by David Grand

Arcade, 224 p., $23.95

Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

Serpent's Tail, 155 p., $14.99

(to be released Jan. 14)

The novels Louse and Whatever both deal with similar fixations: Utopia requires oppres- sive uniformity.

Eccentric geniuses are Machiavellian lunatics.

The distance between healthy pessimism and quivering paranoia keeps getting shorter.

Though the pathway each narrative takes through modern disaffection and detachment is very different, they end up displaying mirror images of the neuroses that underpin an attempt to understand one's isolation in an uncaring world.

Louse's fragmentary plotline, set in the antiseptic confines of "Resort Town of G," is filled with Kafka-esque overtones. It follows Herman Q. Louse—a dutiful manservant and an uncomprehending pawn perfectly content to fulfill his duties with a striking lack of passion or curiosity. His boss Poppy (a caricature of Howard Hughes), is an Executive Controlling Partner and master of untold wealth who presides over countless gray-suited denizens and suffers from steadily declining health.

Some of Poppy's drones have conspired to usurp his power and divert the funds for his latest endeavor, Paradise. As the conspiracy unfolds, the discomfort of an uneasy utopia slips into the acute paranoia of dystopia and Louse's zombie-like defenses crumble under the weight of the coup.

Grand manages to weave, almost imperceptibly, a surprising amount of mythology into Louse (from Milton's rebel angels to the Gnostic demiurge Poppy) while infusing his story with a wicked satiric edge. He manages his readers skillfully, releasing information in bits and pieces of documents and stories, always withholding the grand design.

While Grand occasionally sleepwalks, recapping Howard Hughes' life through a thin veneer of fiction, even this is spiced with the mix of grotesquery and paranoia which pervade the entire book.

Whatever's protagonist, a nameless antihero, is as distasteful, uncaring and cruel as the machinations of the Resort Town of G. A 30-year-old computer programmer with no friends or love life, a four-pack-a-day habit and a penchant for writing perverse and ungainly animal stories in his free time—he's repulsive, yet compelling.

Misanthropic and incredibly bored, he enters a downward spiral punctuated by desperate, sadistic attempts to make something—anything—interesting happen. Sinking in a swamp of hatred and sexual frustration, he manipulates his froglike coworker Tisserand, an inept aging virgin, to rape and murder a woman at a discotheque. At the last minute, Tisserand pulls out. This botched effort destroys Tisserand, the protagonist's career and any tenuous grip he'd had on sanity.

The thoroughly detached and scathingly caustic narration of the book is its high point. Houellebecq's prose, and Paul Hammond's adept translation, make the narrator's depressive nightmare palpable.

A cult hit in France slated for film production, Whatever lacks the narrative daring of Louse. Houellebecq's first-person, diarylike storyline doesn't create the atmosphere of quiet madness as well as Grand's assemblage of pseudo-documentary scraps.

Both of these views of creeping paranoia are off-putting, troubling, even fascinating. Ultimately, though, it's Louse's germ-free nightmare spoofing Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover and modern corporate America which is more satiric and frightening.