Three novels for the man who doesn't fit in: Camus, Ambjornsen and Houellebecq

Camus, Ambjornsen and Houellebecq: the misfit as a diagnosis

There is a minimal library for the man who doesn't fit in, and it almost always consists of the same three names. The Stranger by Albert Camus, Elling, Blood Brothers by Ingvar Ambjornsen and Extension of the Domain of Struggle by Michel Houellebecq. The initial proposal is simple: they leave no one indifferent and they are worth reading. The problem starts when you ask yourself whether they really portray the modern man who doesn't fit in, or just the middle-class archetype who buys books to confirm himself.

Meursault is not a sociopath, he has flat affect

The temptation to slap the sociopath label on Camus's protagonist is high, and wrong. The sociopath manipulates, lies and calculates. Meursault calculates nothing. He doesn't care about Marie, doesn't care about getting married, doesn't care about his dead mother and doesn't care about killing. That is flat affect, not evil. The system doesn't send him to the guillotine for the shooting, but for the unforgivable sin: not crying when he was supposed to cry. Today there would be no blade, there would be a prescription. Same mechanism, less theatre.

The question hovering over this analysis is where that indifference comes from. The answer points to a repeating pattern: the absence of the father. The mother is accounted for —she ends up in a care home— but of the father only one memory remains in the whole book, that of a man who went to see an execution and came back vomiting. Father and guillotine, in the same scene. Camus was months old when his fell at the Marne. That is not literature, it is biography.

Elling: the State as a nursery that files away strangeness

Here the diagnosis is not abstinence, it is antiestéticar. Two men fresh out of a psychiatric institution share a flat in Oslo and discover that the oil-funded Norwegian State keeps them, but also manages them. The one who doesn't fit in is not a dissident, he is a case file. And there is one detail that dismantles the easy reading that they end up isolated until they die: in Ambjornsen's novels the two of them manage to get by, one has a son and the other publishes poems. That is the irony. The system doesn't despise them, it files them away, which is more profitable.

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Houellebecq and the atomized man before it had a name

The third is the most apathetic and the most prophetic. He described the atomized man, without bonds and turned into sensual merchandise, before the schools had a name for it. His characters desire what they will never have —a beautiful woman— and everything else leaves them indifferent. The friend who never touches a breast, who doesn't even know where he parked his car and doesn't care either. The theory going around is that one of them stopped believing in love after a breakup: he understood it is only physical attraction and his companion was the proof. The ending attributed to him, suicide, is not confirmed in the material.

The pattern repeats in all three: absent father, absorbing or diffuse mother, and a system that doesn't despise the one who doesn't fit in, it pathologizes him. The one who stays quiet is ignored; the one who protests gets a prescription; the one who also doesn't consume gets incivil. Different degrees, same drawer. The question left open is whether this portrays the reality of the modern man or just the feeling of a generation that learned to read it in school.