The Elementary Particles
by Michel Houellebecq
Knopf

France hasn't had a literary event to sit up and take notice of since the tedious nouveau roman of the '70s. So it is no surprise that they have taken to Michel Houellebecq as they have. His first novel, 1994's "Extension du Domaine de la Lutte" (inexplicably translated as "Whatever"), got a whole nation of readers arguing over its pathetically screwed-up computer programmer and his merciless attack on consumer culture. A passage on the worthlessness of women who have undergone psychoanalysis was particularly hilarious/reprehensible, depending on your views. All this, though, was small beer compared to the reception given to "The Elementary Particles," published last year in France, and recently in America.

A massive expansion of the poet, essayist and novelist's aims, it is nothing less than an all-out attack on the values of the Sixties, and a catalogue of the disastrous effects these have had on the Western world during the late-Twentieth century. The French took this hard; they still cling to the memory of what they nearly had, and lost, in 1968. That their Judas should be an intelligent man of the Left makes the betrayal doubly bitter. Houellebecq was accused of being a misogynist and reactionary. He responded by moving to Ireland, recording a CD of texts intoned over an easy-listening backing and preparing his third novel, "Lanzarote," which recently appeared in France.

"The Elementary Particles" follows the lives of two half-brothers from their births in the '50s, through the opportunities and disappointments of the '60s and '70s, to desiccated alienation in the '80s and '90s. Although both men find it nigh impossible to love, mostly thanks to their irresponsible hippie parenting, Bruno is the more angry and self-destructive, loathing women for what they won't give him, and himself for not deserving it. When he finds himself in a real, compassionate relationship, and is tested, he fails.

Michel, by contrast, devotes his introverted geek life to genetic research, and in this lies the book's most audacious success. A prologue informs us that Bruno and Michel's histories are being told from under a new world order, safe on the far side of what Houellebecq calls a "metaphysical mutation" — analogous to the rise of Christianity to the cost of the Roman Empire, and of modern science, to the cost of Christianity.

I won't spell it out, but the nature of that sea change, when it comes, throws a marvelously rigorous light back over the whole of the novel. The book is filled with horror — a Manson-like Satanist involved in snuff movies, the joyless orgies of the '70s, the small moments when people could reach out to help others, and fail to — but the consequences of Michel's awesome scientific discovery manage to turn what had been disgust to pity, and to recast as exquisite tragedy what had simply been meaningless suffering.

The book reads quickly, in a fair translation by Frank Wynne. Not that his task was Olympian; Houellebecq is not a stylist, and his prose rarely rises in register above that of the scientific asides on human biology, sociological developments and quantum physics that accompany the story. These at first seem rather facile ("From a moral standpoint, 1970 was marked by a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic ... bare breasts spread quickly across the beaches of the Riviera" and suchlike) but they strike home when you remember that we are not the people this novel is addressed to. Its conceit is that it is written as the historical record of a disappeared age.

What makes "The Elementary Particles" stand out as an important (rather than, say, "brilliant" or "great") novel is not just its timeliness, but the strength of its author's convictions. A master polemicist, Houellebecq tells you not only what happened in the second half of the last century, but, in no uncertain terms, why what happened, happened. You may be converted, you may throw the book aside in despair, but you owe it to Houellebecq to hear him out.

— Jonathan Gibbs (jonathangibbs@mail.com)