What has this balding, middle-aged, misogynist French author got that has women and academia swooning?
During my interview with Michel Houellebecq, none of the following occur: I am not propositioned by the writer who makes a habit of chatting up female interviewers; no incendiary racist or libellous remarks are made; he does not undress and start having sex with his wife, a spectacle with which another journalist was entertained. For God’s sake, he isn’t even drunk, though quite possibly he has been, and, from the bleary focus, not so long ago. For the self-restraint I am grateful; though since he is so famously drawn to the nubile, this sandy-haired little vole has the power to make you feel like a granny at a pyjama party. If you believe his press (he resents journalists, but never have they been more helpful to the building of celebrity, one that has made him a multimillionaire), sex is all to Houellebecq, sole refuge from a value-free, disintegrating society. In his novels the antiheroes are usually hanging on for dear life to a vagina – an organ he generally prefers to its owners
