Why can’t he be loved?

• The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd
  Heinemann, 291 pp, £17.99, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 434 02141 3

Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory tells the story, from the standpoint of a future art history, of a canonical artist of the early 21st century, a Frenchman with the curiously American-sounding name Jed Martin. Such a backward-gazing Künstlerroman invites comparison with the trajectory of the author himself. And Houellebecq also includes a character bearing his own name and more or less corresponding to his public image as the sad bad boy of French literature, and does something unusual with this by now familiar device. Here the famous writer ‘Michel Houellebecq’ – a drunken misanthrope with the fondness for Thai prostitutes we might expect from the author of Plateforme (2001), and a less expected enthusiasm for the writings of William Morris – becomes the victim of an extravagantly gruesome murder.