The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Elementary Particles by Michel HouellebecqJames Sallis
Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles. Trans. Frank Wynne. Knopf, 2000. 272 pp. $25.00.
The French, in literature at least, love their bad boys, their Célines and Rimbauds, and Houellebecq, author of this best-selling, award-winning novel variously compared to work by Balzac, Camus, and Beckett, is the latest of these. Many reviews have stressed the book’s schematic—half-brothers, children of the sixties, raised apart and undone by heritage, inner failings, and the many failings of their era; others the novel’s frank sexuality. Often, in fact, reviewers have seemed at a loss for what to say, and little wonder: this novel speaks the language of profundity, but speaks it poorly, tenses incorrect, articles awry, phrases misplaced. The mark of our time—that great dislocation identified by Virginia Woolf—is that our lives have become discontinuous. Houellebecq’s novel well attests to this, self-generating from the tension between the continuous filament and discontinuous currents of the brothers’ lives as they careen through the sixties in the wake of their own disabilities, sexual liberation, social confusion. The author sometimes seems to have had as little clue as reviewers as to where the book was going, what was intended, his many grafts of philosophical cant and op-ed discursions a manifest of this, as he casts about for handholds. That being said, it must also be remarked that the novel is compulsively readable—readable almost in spite of itself—not for its profundity but for all the small verisimilitudinous touches against which structure and author seem pitched in Jacob-like struggle. Houellebecq wants to stand apart, to be witness to his times. But his characters, like drowning men, grasp him and pull him down with them: he cannot help caring, he cannot help loving them, cannot help drawing with them that final, fatal breath. [James Sallis]