Next time you feel like hitting the beach to read a feel good book that will reaffirm your belief in the human race, choose something by Michel Houellebecq. This polymath will have you laughing in your beach chair and ready to whip out the acoustic guitar for a little "Kumbayah."
The Elementary Particles (AKA Atomised) produces some bone-crunching indictments of a certain trajectory of the generation born out of 1968. The novels two main characters, who are hardly connected half-brothers, are both orphans of a sort. The one, Michel, is a brilliant molecular biologist, while the other, Bruno, is a teacher/civil servant. Early on, neither of them are capable of connecting to another human being, with Bruno spending his youth and middle-age in a sequence of meaningless anonymous sexual encounters and group-sex resort vacations and Michel spending his youth and middle-age isolated in his laboratory. Bruno is in some ways redeemed later in life by his encounter with Christiane, but like all the female characters of any import in the novel, Houellebecq sadistically kills her off.
Houellebecq doesn't seem to want to be liked. He doesn't seem to want to create characters who will be liked. His description of sex is both graphic and matter of fact. In the end, Bruno checks himself into an asylum and Michel commits suicide, leaving the narrator, presumably commenting from a future many years away, to expound on the impact that Michel has had on the eventual ability of man to overcome himself/herself (a la Brave New World or Nietzsche).
The narrator-from-the-future is the only part of the novel that rings false, like a clumsy attempt to give the novel more meaning than it contains. Unlike the classic framing tale of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, this device isn't located at the front of the text as a preface to explain how the manuscript came to be. Rather, it's interwoven through narratorial intrusions that point out significant events that led to Michel's groundbreaking theories that, the narrator assures us, really are important.
In some ways Houellebecq's framing device reminds me of a Jack London novel, The Iron Heel. London's novel is more of a tract explaining why Socialism is the proper way, because it's really a series of dialogues in novelistic form, with each chapter providing the protagonist a chance to debate different pillars of the community (clergy types, chamber of commerce types, etc.). Whereas London's novel resounds with the confidence of its protagonist, The Elementary Particles is much more ambivalent about human interrelations and our future as a species.
The Elementary Particles is a curious book that I believe could be manipulated to mean many opposing things. Certainly it can be read as a reactionary rejection of the sexual revolution that orphaned its main characters. However, it also can be read as a limited rejection of the new sexual freedom, the major target of which is not the sexual freedom but rather the destruction of the family that accompanied it. The major failure of both Michel and Bruno is their emotional immaturity or if you prefer isolation, and it should not be forgotten that Bruno at least overcomes that isolation (if only temporarily) through his graphically depicted sexual escapades with Christiane (even if in the end he fails her). Houellebecq is gesturing toward the impasse between radical individualism and community (understood as family, neighborhood, perhaps even species), and while the chasm he explores is brutal, it may yield a hard bought step.
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