Whatever

About “Whatever”

By Michel Houellebecq, this 1994 novel follows a narrator, just thirty, with a well-paid job and no love life, who smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes odd animal stories in his spare time. Tolerably content in his boredom, he is sent with the unimaginably ugly Raphael Tisserand to train provincial civil servants on a new computer system, in a grim, funny exploration of corporate jargon and psychobabble.