The Elementary Particles

From AwardAnnals

This book was also published under the title Atomised.

Reviews

Amazon.com

Bruno and Michel are half-brothers, born to a hippie mother who believed in following her bliss. As boys they live in ignorance of each other—at one point attending the same school without knowing of their blood connection. As grown men they’re not truly close, but they occasionally phone each other late at night. Bruno’s a hopeless sexual obsessive, often drunk or on his way there, and Michel’s a molecular biologist, distant and inaccessible.

Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles follows these brothers through the latter half of the 20th century. Bruno and Michel are buffeted by history, vessels of disappointment and desire rocked by the ocean of time. Shuttled away to a boarding school where he’s sexually abused by other boys, Bruno grows up full of twisted sexual longings and a contempt for aging women so palpable that at times it’s stomach-churning. At a commune in the country, Bruno takes stock:

The women were intolerable at breakfast, but by cocktail hour the mystical tarts were hopelessly vying with younger women once again. Death is the great leveler. On Wednesday afternoon he met Catherine, a fifty-year-old who had been a feminist of the old school. She was tanned, with dark curly hair; she must have been very attractive when she was twenty. Her breasts were still in good shape, he thought when he saw her by the pool, but she had a fat ass.

Michel doesn’t hate women; he doesn’t even notice them. Instead of leering at bodies by the pool, he stares at particles in microscopes. He wins prizes for his experiments, but never experiences the rush of life. For both men, the damage has been done by history, by mother, before the story begins. What interests Houellebecq are the permutations and recapitulations of damage—the way the particles of the self can never be completely reconstituted. —Emily White

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Michel Houellebecq’s dark and disturbing novel Atomised sees him establish himself as a unique and important voice in European letters. With his first work, Whatever, Houellebecq had created a sassy, street-wise bulletin of disaffected existentialism, and here that voice brilliantly extends its range. Atomised (from the French Les Particules élémentaires) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who seem to represent two sides of Houellebecq himself (there are more than a few moments in the book where we feel we are reading a strange roman à clef). Michel, a molecular biologist, finds ordinary, human emotions inexplicable, making him seem abstruse and cold. Bruno is his opposite: a frustrated libertine trapped in a body most find repellant but still holding sex up as his most validating moment. Through these skewed archetypes an intricate, sometimes quite moving story of the brothers’ lives is formed.

Houellebecq obviously has a formidable intellect and, like the best French writers, manages to rail against anthropology, psychoanalysis, New Age philosophy and modern society in general without losing sight of his narrative—indeed the narrative is controlled quite beautifully, the pacing excellent, the switching from one brother’s story to the other’s done with a quiet grace. While some of Houellebecq’s views are at the least questionable, and while there are moments when the conclusions to be drawn from his broadsides are disturbing, this never negates the value of the work. This is an ambitious book in which Houellebecq asks important questions: if sex is continually degraded by its increasing commodification and, concomitantly, genetics increasingly offers us the opportunity for procreation without recourse to it, where does that leave us? How do we navigate ourselves, afloat as we are, in this new moral universe? What does the increasing pace of scientific change mean to the conversations non-scientists have about our lives? What place does something called spirituality, whatever that means, have in this brave, new world? This is a big, bold, clever book that has already achieved more than cult status in France. Houellebecq should be read, and read carefully, if not always believed. — Mark Thwaite

Barnes and Noble

Elementary, My Dear Houellebeqc

In 1998, a French novel created a firestorm of controversy and provoked unheard-of sales in Europe. Written by a virtually unknown 40-year-old computer technician and former mental patient named Michel Houellebecq, Les particles élementaires made a stinging indictment of contemporary Western society through its use of explicit sex, lengthy philosophical ruminations, and corrosive black humor. Now, in its much anticipated English translation, The Elementary Particles appears on these shores.

Houellebecq’s book chronicles the fates of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, whose lives intertwine with each other and with the events of the late 20th century. Withdrawn and unemotional, Michel conducts cutting-edge genetic research while coldly pondering human frailty. Bruno’s compulsive sexual appetites are matched only by his stunning romantic failures, which eventually drive him into an asylum. Together, they represent polar extremes of human existence—hyper-rationality and hyper-sensualism—revolving about each other like the subatomic building blocks of the book’s title.

For Houellebecq, the so-called liberation movements of the 1960s have led inexorably toward “the suicide of the West.” In upending Judeo-Christian morality and fragmenting the traditional family, and in preaching the absolute primacy of the individual, they have created a society in which consumption and the pursuit of transient pleasures—sexual and material—are everything. The quest for happiness has petered out in a sea of painkillers and television screens, in dead-end relationships and loveless copulation. Houellebecq’s constant references to the behavior of various other species, from insects to apes, imply that humans are really not much different from animals. Society must operate under a strict “moral law” in order to control these Hobbesian tendencies, which manifest themselves in places like Bruno’s boarding school, where the merciless tormenting by the other students would scar him for life.

Still, if the author’s worldview seems unrelentingly pessimistic—provoking outrage among the French clergy, humanists, and veterans of the 1968 student movement, among others—Houellebecq can also be very funny, no more so than when poking fun at the cherished convictions of the New Age hippies with whom Michel and Bruno interact. Their attempts to live “closer to nature” are lampooned mercilessly; Houellebecq clearly believes that nature is something we should want to escape: It is arbitrary and violent, not fuzzy and warm.

Though world-weary to the core, The Elementary Particles concludes on a note of grudging admiration for the human animal, “this vile, unhappy race…tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome, and infinitely selfish, it was capable of extraordinary violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love.” Houellebecq’s unflinching examination of the millennial West should interest Americans, toward whom many of the book’s observations might equally be directed. —Jonathan Cook