SOURCE: Madar, Chase. Review of Interventions, by Michel Houellebecq. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5038 (22 October 1999): 36.

In the following review, Madar compliments Houellebecq's tone of iconoclastic “left-conservatism” in Interventions.

The scandal and success of Michel Houellebecq's novel Les Particules élémentaires (1998) has led the editors at Flammarion to deem their author's miscellaneous journalism worth assembling under a single binding. Interventions is a hodgepodge of book and film reviews, feuilletonistic sketches and interviews. Some items, like “Opera Bianca”, a male/female dialogue for a video installation, seem present only to fill space in this slim book, but most of the enthusiasms (for modern physics, Kant and silent film) and anathemas (against hippies, the Maastricht treaty and holidays; a lead-off essay called “Jacques Prévert est un con”) collected here are pungent and amusing. Houellebecq often expresses thoughts which seem blasphemous from a Parisian. He has no use for the practice of...