Some keys that I think turn this from pure narcissistic kvetching into good literature are the discussions of interiority/exteriority, pastoral/urban, and freedom/control. The book is speckled with these everywhere. The narrator’s main job is to bring rural agricultural government divisions into the 21st century via a nebulous data processing program called Maple. To do this he must travel outward from modern, internal, frenetic Paris to towns in the countryside and on the coast. As he traces this hub-and-spoke path through France on his company’s whim, his only expressions of freedom are: a manic cigarette habit that leaves him hospitalized with a heart condition, paid phone sex, writing stories about erudite conversations between animals about the sexual maladies of society, and vicarious violence.

I’m reminded of what little I know of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society, where he discusses the importance of creative expression for people in a society and society’s facilitation of that creativity at scale. He says that when creative expression is suppressed we are left with people whose only subversive and creative outlets can be violence. That violence can be enacted against others or one’s self or, in Houellebecq’s case here, both. Like so many factory farmed sow biting the tails of their brethren in line for the slaughter.

The original French title is Extension du domaine de la lutte. Which translates to something like “extension of the domain of struggle” or, more idiomatically, “extension of the combat zone.” Certainly as long as young men to view the sexual market as a war zone we can expect them to have trouble extricating violence from the equation. I suppose the best reaction we could hope for from some of them who are too far gone is simply, “Whatever.”