My copy of Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires bears the English (and British) title Atomised; in the US, Knopf published the same translation (by Frank Wynne – credit where credit is due, he won the IMPAC for it) under the more literal rendering The Elementary Particles. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first thing. Published in French 1999, English translation 2000. But I've always had trouble swimming with the current of time, so. . . .
Houellebecq's (what a name!) novel tells the story of two half-brothers: Michel Djerzinski, a successful molecular biologist well-respected in his field, and Bruno Clément, a sometime secondary school teacher, civil servant, and (pseudo?) reactionary poet and journalist. Both share a common, absent, hippie-inflected mother who deserted both of them early in childhood to more fully live out her burgeoning New Age ideals. “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”
There are two ideological valences in which this narrative, and the characters within this narrative, orbit. One is that of 20th century scientific discovery and progress: big ideas in theoretical physics, molecular genetics and high-level mathematics (quantitative and otherwise) are name-dropped and much more than that. At times concepts of a high order are explicated or elaborated with such facility and clarity as to put modern textbooks to shame.
The other is the etiology through time of a set of (once) counter-cultural ideas and practices, traceable as a related group back to the 1950s, which have been absorbed, transformed or otherwise neutralized through their encounters and conflicts with Society at large; in simplified terms, it's the “lovable leftism” that gave us beatniks, then hippies, and finally the various iterations of New-Ageism, a trajectory that is traced until we arrive in the “fin du millenium” France of the late 90s, washed up like a sodden book whose pages are intact but whose ink has been bleached out by the sea's salinity.
While Houellebecq clearly identifies with both Michel and Bruno, and in a very definite sense presents them as victims of a type (though not necessarily the same type) he never spares them, not for a second. I don't think it's too much to say that a certain level of “spiritual autobiography” is detectable throughout the novel, but I don't want to get hung up on parallels between the life of the author and the lives of his characters. Instead, a word about the style.
The writing is lucid and direct, rather unflinching but not, in my opinion, indulgent when it comes to graphic sexual description or the depiction of views – racist, misogynistic, etc. – that are wrong prima facie. The long sections that I alluded to earlier – and they are often deliberately set apart from other parts of the narrative as such – in which anecdotes of the idealism of past decades are related, or long disquisitions on the nature of some scientific whatever, present interesting questions as to the nature of the narrative voice.
When first reading the novel, I assumed that at least the technical expostulations were a form of rather reckless free indirect style, originating as a voice in the character of Michel, as consummate and lucid a brooder as fiction has produced. Much of the narrative regarding things like feminism, nudist resorts, gurus and the like came somehow (or so I assumed) from Bruno. And much of it does indeed, but that's half or less than half of the "truth" by the end of the novel's Epilogue.
One interesting and very effective tactic that the novel employs is to tell us something that's really heart-wrenching – a good example would be the profound, unrequited love of the young Annabelle for the young Michel – and then go off on something that appears to bear no relation to either what's just been related or the story as a whole, something like the Macmillan hypothesis or the potential uses of two mathematical principles in combination.
This produces a cold, alienating effect, but also forces a dialectical situation on the reader, sometimes generative of very interesting ideas. It can't be said that the method is subtle, but the seeming lack of subtlety throughout the narrative seems to be a a conscious choice on Houellebecq's part.
But unfortunately, the key to the narrative voice is not revealed until the final pages of the novel, and I think it's worth not spoiling it for any potential reader. I'll say just these, probably useless words about the matter: the framing device of the story is, while not wholly consistent or plausible in and of itself, the sort of thing worthy of Vonnegut or Burroughs, although the style in very, very different from either of them.
When it first came out, Atomised/The Elementary Particles caused quite a bit of controversy, mostly in France, despite or probably because of being a huge bestseller both at home and (almost as rare as Mendelevium in nature for a French novel) abroad as well. Houellebecq has been accused, not unlike his character Bruno (against whom these accusations are probably fairly made) that he is a mentally sick reactionary, that he hates women and has at best a paternal attitude towards minorities, etc., etc., etc.
While I could say a few words in defense of reactionary writers of great ability and importance – Céline, for example – I wouldn't want to give the idea that either (a.) I think those kinds of ideas are justified in any way, or (b.) that there's validity to these claims made against Houellebecq. And he's not just a Francophone Martin Amis, the great prose stylist and Muslim-hating linguistic pedant – although this book reminded me a lot of Money. Or maybe that's exactly what he is?
Those who have leveled their polemical guns at Houellebecq are the same kinds of people who would consider Sade, Bataille or Klossowski nothing more than pornographers. Although putting it that way maybe doesn't put the author of Atomised in a very good light or the right kind of company. One possible account of the situation would be to say that France is a stupid culture plagued by stupid and meaningless internal controversies that no one else could care about if they wanted to, a culture that produces some of the best writers, filmmakers, painters and, to a lesser extent, composers in the world.
For what it's worth, I think this is more or less what Houellebecq thinks, too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/03/michelhouellebecq.france.
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