Accepting dubious recommendations from the narrator of The Marbled Swarm, who perused a few pages of this in order to be able to appear to to have read it in conversation. 
 What is it? Essentially, sociological investigation and provocation through the lens of the international tourism economy: 
 I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares. I was particularly fond of the star rating system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximize his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyzes the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group opr to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialized purchase); but the Buadrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. 
 This is from near the start, where the prose seems most exceptional and refined, even in translation, where the deadened interior monologues of a middle-aged bureaucrat, a fundamentally repulsive non-person, are constantly intercut as above with statistical information and sociological data. He sounds like he could be a sociopath. It's harsh, hilarious, actually often piercing. It works. Almost every page we're blindsided by something like: "On an intellectual level, I was suddenly capable of acknowledging the attractions of the Muslim vagina." 
 The prose style evens out after that at a somewhat more modest level, but the book is nothing if not carefully composed and directed throughout. Houellebecq can write, and he doesn't shy away from anything here; much of the books provocation is actually of thought. 
 That said, the seemingly fundamental value in the book is simply that of pleasure, presented (cynically? naively?) as the one remaining avenue of genuine human contact in an increasingly desensitized and alienated western world, a world which continues to export its failing ideals all over the globe. And so, there's a lot of sex. Strangely, Houellebecq's cold, almost brusque cataloguing of sex acts actually worked pretty effectively here. He didn't grasp at awkward flights of lyricism, doesn't fall into the numbing boredom of overzealous lengthy description. He keeps things concise and direct and somehow convinced me, almost sentimentally, of some kind of real connection taking place. This is a widely debated point, if we go by other reviews, but I found it all more empathetic than, say, the oddly artificial sex culminating The Girl Beneath the Lion (freshest in my mind since I read it last week). Valerie, in any event, seems a far more effectual and sympathetic human than our narrator, though their paths coincide. What exactly ties her to him isn't entirely clear, it is true, but was oddly unworried by this while actually reading. 
 So anyway, sexual pleasure is presented as the ideal here, almost, certainly to the characters who draft marketing taglines like "Pleasure is a right." I mean, shouldn't it be? Maybe? Does Houellebecq agree? Hard to say exactly, there're some terribly flawed social models here, unflinchingly presented, and though the social reformers are presented as unsympathetically as nearly everyone else, they also are "vindicated" in some way by actions that undercut everything else that has been built up. Throughout, Houellebecq's modeling of pleasure is precisely matched against apocalyptic social forces that the protagonists are inclined to utterly ignore as much as obliviously provoke. There's ambiguity as to what it all adds up to by inevitable finish, which deep analysis by others suggest is symptomatic of "idealogical double-crossing" and careful obfuscation of intent, but though I find it hard to disagree with Marie Redonnet here, I can't entirely dismiss Houellebecq as an asshole either. Or, if he's an asshole, he's one with talents, and possible uses. 
 ... 
 Strangely, only a day later, I'm having trouble recalling why this wasn't a more annoying or problematic book to me while I was actually reading it, but somehow it wasn't.