NRO Weekend, Thanksgiving 2000
Particularly Provocative
Reviewing Michel Houellebecq’s mini-phenomenon, The Elementary Particles.

By Sam Goldman, who is studying in Trinity College, Oxford

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Frank Wynne (264 pp., Knopf, $25)

ere is a recipe for notoriety in an age when literature's power to provoke seems to have been eroded:

1. Write a novel attacking the greatest sacred cow of them all (or at least among editors and the press): the '60s; the sexual revolution; modern technology; yes, the whole bloody lot.

2. Fill the novel with plenty of casual sex, and what The New York Times Magazine winkingly calls "anomie."

3. Make lots of crypto-fascist statements in interviews, tastefully interspersed with references to your own greatness.

4. Public alcoholism, with the suggestion of sexual perversion.

5. Count the money.

In fact, this is the actual story of Parisian writer Michel Houellebecq and his novel Les particules elementaires. Originally published in French in 1998, the book quickly became the conversation piece of the year. The novel has been simultaneously heralded as an ingenious indictment of 1968 — the year France was brought to a standstill by New Leftist student-led riots — and damned as a cruelly misanthropic throwaway. Houellebecq, a former computer programmer, rocketed from obscurity to guru status: a novelist of ideas in a cultural moment that seems to lack any.

Now translated into English as The Elementary Particles, Americans are getting their crack at the Houellebecq mini-phenomenon (the same translation was published last year in England as Atomised). The first impressions were less than effusive. The New Criterion attacked it last month as pornographic, and "no more an attack on those excesses [of the 1960s] than was the Woodstock festival or William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch." A Times critic called it "a deeply repugnant read," and unless protests generate publicity, as they did for American Psycho, Knopf's huge print run will be a costly mistake. So much, perhaps, for Monsieur Houellebecq.

Not so fast. The Elementary Particles is an explicit and nasty polemic, without much art or sympathy. But it is also an honest and unsparing salvo against this poisonous, amoral culture of ours, "an age that was miserable and troubled." Who says, considering the West at the turn of the century, that there are many pleasant words to be written?

Shot through with the language of biology and physics, and constructed within a science fiction framing device, The Elementary Particles reads almost like the account of a bizarre experiment. There are two human guinea pigs: half-brothers Michel and Bruno. Michel, a painfully introverted biologist, will change the course of human evolution, by developing a cloned, post-human master race. Bruno is a sex-crazed civil servant. They are both, of course, miserable.

It's more than happenstance. Bruno and Michel are victims of the cultural revolution. Their mother, an affluent French Algerian, abandons them for the California New Age commune of Esalen. Their different fathers (Michel's bequeaths him the surname Djerzinski, the same as Stalin's infamous secret police chief) could not have been less interested in raising the boys, so they grow up separately with saintly grandmothers, acutely damaged by what we would now call a lack of positive role models. "In reality," Bruno observes of his own fatherhood, "men don't give a damn about their kids, they never really love them. In fact, I'd say men aren't capable of love; the emotion is completely alien to them. The only emotions they know are desire in the form of pure animal lust and male rivalry."

In Elementary Particles, which is really a dramatization of the old critique of the Enlightenment, people are reduced by rationality to an emotionally barren, robotic existence, all the more painful because technology has eliminated the Malthusian imperative. They compete in other things because they don't know how to do anything else. Bruno and Michel are anthropological specimens, suffering through adolescence as merely "the weakest…the omega male." And "among higher primates…weaker animals suffer acts of gratuitous cruelty." Like other French writers, Houellebecq seems to pine for the elevating authority of the Church without wanting to look ridiculous, so he lampoons his detachment as inevitable: "The agnosticism at the heart of the French republic would facilitate the progressive, hypocritical and slightly sinister triumph of the determinist worldview."

Houellebecq's didactic tendencies have frustrated some critics. His narrative voice. For example, is muddled; and The Elementary Particles is not one of those novels to be read for its lush characterizations. Because they are not supposed to be real people anyway, Bruno and Michel exist by the novel's second half as little more than vehicles for social criticism. Towards the end, both pick up love interests of a sort. Michel takes up with his childhood crush, whom he was too timid to romance as boy; Bruno meets a fellow libertine at a sex camp. You just know that both women will meet bad ends, and Houellebecq has been accused of misogyny for killing them off. Really, though, they are human sacrifices to an obsession with progress and change. "In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance."

Actually, The Elementary Particles offers a convincing argument that the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women. The "cult of the body beautiful," after all, demands vastly higher standards of women than men. Given a cultural obsession with youth and sex, laissez-faire economics produces a free market in immorality. Houellebecq, who apparently has an "open marriage," may be an odd defender of the traditional family, but his work implies nothing else.

Houellebecq wraps the whole production up with a sort of thumbnail history of human society after Michel, disgusted with the venality of the world, disappears into rural Ireland to conduct his pioneering research in genetics. This could be, and one hopes it is, a sly joke about existentialism. Samuel Beckett made just the opposite journey, so Houellebecq goes from Waiting for Godot to Making Godot. The scientific papers Michel pens lay the foundation for the production of a new species. The "gods," as Houellebecq calls them, reproduce asexually, freeing them from a brutal mating competition that the overpopulated world no longer requires. Their exquisitely sensitive bodies — lots of digressions on the physiology of pleasure here — allow them to enjoy "undreamt of erotic possibilities." Humanity dies out, with "meekness," "resignation," and "even…relief." The world is saved — from itself.

This device has been criticized as ridiculous. Perhaps so, but it seems an effective parting shot against rationalism: boundless faith in science saving humanity by eliminating it. It is an hypothesis worth considering, as advancements in genetics and contraception remove people further and further from the natural reproductive order.

Most reviewers have duly noted Houellebecq's debt to the once-fashionable gurus of French nihilism: Sartre, Camus, and the notoriously scabrous Celine. While all of them inform Houellebecq's prose style — particularly Celine, whose use of the staccato Parisian argot anticipates Houellebecq's fragmented dialogues and his dim view of society — it is lazy criticism to write off The Elementary Particles as a bargain-bin Nausea.

A much more revealing comparison is with J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash, which chronicles the anti-erotic proclivities of affluent professionals so disaffected that they can find sexual satisfaction only in an escalating series of automobile accidents. For both authors, the banality of titillation raises the sexual stakes ever higher, until pain and death are the only extraordinary "turn-ons."

But whereas Ballard's crash enthusiasts were clearly deviant, Houellebecq's characters navigate a "sexual model proposed by the dominant culture [and] governed by the principle of adventure." He calls the system "Sadean," and it ought to be familiar to anyone who has watched an episode of HBO's hit Sex and the City. Like Brave New World, which Houellebecq cites extensively, Crash is a farce and forecast. In its most lucid moments, like Bruno's visit to a hippie phalanstery turned corporate sex retreat, The Elementary Particles is almost journalistic.

As literature, The Elementary Particles is not particularly appealing. While Houellebecq's brusque style suits his premise, it does not make for great reading. There is, nonetheless, philosophical meat for conservatives, and the operation will take no more than a couple of hours. Although he can deal in smut, it would be foolish to smugly dismiss Houellebecq as a literary entrant in the "Sensation" sweepstakes. Damien Hirst's bisected cow, I think, tells us little. As a novel and as an artifact, The Elementary Particles confirms a great deal that we intuitively know.