One of Michel Houellebecq's Many Prophecies

A review of the "The Elementary Particles"

What follows is a review of The Elementary Particles, a rare modern masterpiece. Its author, Michel Houellebecq, is the reigning heavyweight champion of the world; his novels bring a tremendous hope to contemporary literature.

If you’d like to read this review in print, you can subscribe via Substack or purchase the issue on our website. The first round of orders will be arriving in mailboxes everywhere late December / early January. Happy reading and holidays to all!

Spread from the print magazine

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Earlier this year I was trying to think of the best ass I’d ever seen. It was impossible. Think of one and one hundred more come crashing over you like waves. By then I already knew that rankings, most of the time, are nonsensical. But I was ranking anyway because my mind was breaking down. There’s a reason Fitzgerald made lists, “hundreds of lists,” when he was cracking up. Lists are a cry for help. They give the anxious mind what it wants more than all else: order, the feeling of focus, the experience of thinking continuously.

But many of the most important categories have no order. There is no ranking. It’s fruitless to rate The Elementary Particles, published in 1998, against the twentieth century’s novels. All one can say is that Michel Houellecbecq goes the distance with Vonnegut and Carver, a jangled Céline, even an injured Hemingway. I don’t know about you but this came to me as a great relief. For years I’d been believing that all the great writers were dead. But now I know that there is one still kicking over in France, and if there is one then there is always the chance of multiplication. Good writing spreads faster than the clap.

As a classical novel measured against time-honored rules, Particles holds up well. Set in France during the second half of the twentieth century, the novel follows the lives of two half-brothers who share the same mother. Michel is a lonely, despondent, brilliant scientist who holds rationality sacrosanct. His brother, Bruno, is a sex-crazed high school teacher who pursues only pleasure. Both are unfulfilled spiritually and romantically; the novel’s dramatic tension arises from their last opportunities at experiencing love. There is plot, conflict, character, theme—enough to make Shakespeare’s skeleton hop out of the grave and do a jig on the casket.

In many other aspects Particles is terrifically modern. The language is new and colloquial, there are plenty of cocks and cunts throughout. In literature slang is not inherently good or bad, but it certainly is hard to pull off. I’ve read writers who’ve tried to imbue slay, goated, aura, brunch, fuck boy, vibe, bricked, giving, lit, sick, cringe, low key, besties, rizz, and edging with artistic integrity. They’ve all failed. They use the words too literally, in contexts that are too expected. Bushwick girls calling Lana Del Ray Mother is too on the nose. Houellebecq succeeds where others fail because he breaks patterns. Just as Tarantino gives cool a new gravitas in True Romance, the Frenchman transposes common expressions from their predicted settings into surprising ones. Through this metamorphosis, the spoken word becomes art. If modern writers insist on using “serving cunt,” they should do something new with it. The expression used in a eulogy, for a prostitute who died working a soup kitchen, fits better than in a teenage text chat. As Céline proved with his “little music,” the original use of familiar words can restore their vitality.

To create vibrancy and velocity, Houellebecq writes short chapters with many scenes. It is not uncommon for an entire movement to take place in one highly-detailed, vivid paragraph. He sets these scenes firmly on the page; one reads them with the focus short poems or paintings demand. In the twenty-first century, this might be one of the few remaining styles that can achieve both literary merit and mass-market accessibility.

If one considers the story’s vernacular and tempo safer contemporary bets, then its chronology is its greatest risk. Beginning with Michel’s departure from university in 1998, the tale then rewinds one hundred years back to the birth of his grandparents. For the next seventy pages, nearly thirty percent of the novel’s running time, the narrator interweaves the lives of the brothers before returning to where the book began. This much background is generally considered a big nicht-nicht. Fiction workshops, God bless ’em, state that there should be ten times more front story than back story. Hemingway’s iceberg theory depends on a conscious withholding of historical information. Vonnegut lived by the rule that every sentence should “reveal character or advance action.” The Great Gatsby is a much stronger novel because Fitzgerald cut the protagonist’s back story from the beginning of the novel (he later released this as the short story “Absolution”).

Houellebecq makes back story work because Particles is as much a sociological study as it is a novel. He starts by elucidating how society shifts during the twentieth century, so that he can later reveal how those shifts come to bear on the main characters. When the story starts moving forward again, their decisions, value systems, and modes of thinking become predictable—almost determined—while simultaneously taking on a greater significance. Houellebecq pulls the stage curtains back and exposes the machine that moves men and women. Strange as they may appear at first glance, Michel and Bruno are not outcasts in a vacuum. They are microcosms of the society that created them. More and more, the reader starts to see the machine that rules his own life. It isn’t natural to message twenty girls on Tinder after watching fifty pornographic Instagram reels. Our actions are not entirely of our design. We act as we do, to a large extent, because the machinery changed.

One of the predominant forces Houellbecq focuses on is the sexual revolution. The reader first understands it through Jane, the mother of Michel and Bruno. Born in 1928, she is in the vanguard of what will become the sexual liberation movement. At the age of thirteen, she loses her virginity, “a remarkable achievement given the time and place” (20). From there she is off to the races. The races result in two sons, separated until adolescence because she abandons them to different sets of grandparents. After ridding herself of the pests, Jane follows the hippies to California where she spends a few years participating in sex cults. Triumphantly, she returns to France to do more of the same.

Before Particles I’d always thought highly of sixties and seventies culture. I’m not as sure now. Houellebecq reframes the movement by exposing the lost values that made it possible (e.g. sex is sacred), and by explicitly stating the new beliefs that replaced them (e.g. pleasure is supreme). Undoubtedly, his view is slanted because of his own experience. Jane is based on his real mother, a woman even more self-absorbed, delusional, and callous than her fictional counterpart. But even if Houellebecq’s angle is personally tainted, his perspective is valuable because it is a true, uncommon counter-narrative to the prevailing story. Most people think of the sixties as a halcyon. Everyone loves Presley, Monroe, that picture of Jayne Mansfield’s tits on Minetta Tavern’s northern wall. Yet hardly anyone gives credence to the way in which they, and America as a whole, ushered in “the mass consumption of sexual pleasure” (21). Hardly anyone talks about the underbelly of sexual freedom, which has led to generations that have since sought it out obsessively.

These ideas are more relevant now than ever. The confluence of “sexual liberation” and modern technology has ushered in the pornification of everything and everyone. Social media platforms, from YouTube to Twitter, are filled with billions of images that countless men, this writer included, jerk off to. Millions of Instagram profiles, already verging on porn in and of themselves, are three clicks away from nudes, facials, and gangbangs. Women who never would have considered sex work ten years ago are opening OnlyFans accounts by the thousands. In June of this year, The Economist reported that eight percent of Swedish girls, fifteen to nineteen, had already prostituted themselves or sold sexual content online. Worse still are the nameless internet mobs that cheer these sexual champions on. It is now heroic to film yourself taking one trillion dicks in exchange for fame and profit.

Bruno’s life is the embodiment of a sex-based value system. As soon as his nuts drop they grab the wheel. During his adolescence he becomes a slave to his most base instincts; since he can’t get any, what follows is a string of perversions and sexual offenses that satiate his pathological craving—but only momentarily. Soon he needs more. He splits his time at college between fast food restaurants, pornographic theaters, and brothels. After miraculously marrying in his thirties, he starts lusting after his sixteen year-old students. The union was never destined to last:

“‘I met Anne in 1981… She wasn’t really beautiful, but I was tired of jacking off. The good thing, though, was she had big tits. I’ve always liked big tits . . . A WASP with big tits . . .’ To Michel’s surprise, his eyes were wet with tears. ‘Later, her tits started to go south and our marriage went with them.’” (142)

Though many of Bruno’s episodes are dark in nature, he is an overwhelmingly comic figure. The narrator’s detached, humorous, flippant voice paces the scenes perfectly, staying with them long enough to evoke a reaction, yet never dwelling on the darkness within them. Other parties’ reactions lighten the mood of Bruno’s obscenities, which are often so absurd that they’re impossible to take seriously. After becoming jealous of a black student’s success with his favorite teenager, for example, Bruno submits a racist manifesto to a literary magazine. Earlier on, as a youth, he takes to masturbating on trains:

“If it was possible—and it almost always was—he would find a girl on her own and sit facing her. Most of them wore see-through blouses or something similar and crossed their legs. He would not sit directly opposite but at an angle, sometimes sharing the same seat a couple feet away. He would get a hard-on the moment he saw the sweep of long blonde or dark hair. By the time he sat down, the throb in his underpants would be unbearable. He would take a handkerchief out of his pocket as he sat down and open a folder across his laps. In one or two tugs it was over. Sometimes, if the girl uncrossed her legs just as he was taking his cock out, he didn’t even need to touch himself—he came the moment he saw her panties. The handkerchief was a backup; he didn’t really need it. Usually he ejaculated across the folder, over pages of second-order equations, diagrams of insects or a graph of goal production in the USSR. The girl would keep reading her magazine.” (51)

If the novelist had written this story in contemporary times, Bruno would have turned out differently. Since the narrator methodically documents the influences on his life, the reader knows why. Instead of jerking off to fully-clothed women as a teen, Modern Bruno would’ve watched gangbangs. Instead of watching light porn in public theaters as a young man, he would’ve been in his basement getting off to murderous videos. Instead of visiting prostitutes as an adult, he would’ve been incapable of physical interaction with a real woman. If he’d grown up in France I don’t know exactly what he would’ve become. If he’d grown up in the US, I do.

The cultural chain of events that leads to Bruno’s despair is clear: Society’s abandonment of traditional values and religious systems leads to the sexual revolution, which leads to his endless pursuit of sexual gratification. Since he cannot satisfy his cravings, he becomes miserable.

His brother is wholly different. Michel has no sexual desire and little interest in pleasure. The chain of events shakes out differently in his case. What sinks him into an existential crisis is not ascendant hedonism but the loss of tradition and religion:

“There used to be a time when, late in life, a man would come home to feel a certain affection for his spouse—though not before she’d borne his children, made a home for them, cooked, cleaned and proved herself in the bedroom. That sort of regard meant they enjoyed sleeping in the same bed. It was probably not what the women were looking for, and it might even have been a delusion—but it could be a powerful feeling. Strong enough that… [men] literally could not live without their wives. When, out of unhappiness, their wives left them, they hit the bottle and died soon afterward… Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property… That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inert. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience: past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now.” (141)

Michel is even more miserable than his brother, who at least has pleasure to chase. What is there for Michel? His despondence with an ephemeral, meaningless world goes beyond a personal depression. He cannot make sense of life itself. Nature is full of strong animals dismembering the weak. Humanity is a long series of horrors, which repeatedly feature rape, slavery, torture, and murder. There are bright spots during individual lives, but if one adds up the moments of suffering and joy, which way would the scale tip? This thinking leads him to the “unshakeable conviction… that nature, taken as a whole, was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.” (29)

Those who closely follow tragedies may find this nihilistic worldview familiar. After a man blew himself up outside a fertility clinic in May, Katherine Dee wrote a Pirate Wires piece on the philosophy, efilism, that inspired his attempt at murder. “While traditional antinatalists focus on the decision not to have children,” she writes, “efilists advocate for something far more extreme: the elimination of all sentient life on Earth.” Though efilisim is a radical ideology advocated for by a few thousand psychos—puny as far as creeds go—the movement is already linked to other horrors. One month before the bombing, another apostle convinced her boyfriend to execute her while she slept. Thirteen years earlier, the belief that life itself is malevolent motivated a monster to shoot thirty children at Sandy Hook. Thankfully Michel does not share the same interest in violence. His view is closer to that of other anti-natalists, like the rabid climate activists that believe it’s unethical to have children. The Modern Michel, however, would have been more extreme in his views.

Particles is prescient because it predicts behavior based on metaphysical mutations: “radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe” (1). Two such examples are Christianity and modern science, both of which “[swept] away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgements and social hierarchies” (2). Nearly thirty years on from the book’s publication, we are still living through the same cultural value system that shaped Michel and Bruno. The difference today is that the inventions of the colossal incels—Jobs, Musk, Zuck, etc.—have made the consequences more grave.

The novel predicts that society will continue along these tracks until a new technology or moral system shunts it onto different ones. Based on the current landscape, it is likely that A.I. will cause the next mutation.

Releasing this technology into the modern world is risky. We’ve already observed the catastrophic effects of layering less sophisticated inventions onto our crumbling moral landscape. Now, with A.I., it is possible to design avatars to meet your exact sexual preferences. After weighing loneliness against digital companionship, many have already resorted to subsisting off the latter. According to DemandSage, a reporting service, twenty million people chat with their virtual girlfriends on character.ai each month. With Musk’s latest invention, a $300 per month A.I. porn service, this number is sure to increase.

On the philosophical front, A.I. is already fanning the flames of nihilism. What’s the point of studying if algorithms will exterminate wide swaths of white-collar jobs within the next five years? What’s the point of slaving away on a novel if there is no way to prove that it was you—not a machine—who wrote it? What’s the point of having children if A.I. may eliminate human beings entirely?

The general public is not as excited about this “innovation” as the tech-lords. Most would prefer another metaphysical mutation to the A.I. ghoul Zuck is building. Through the novel’s central conflict—can the brothers overcome their programming and find love?—Houellbecq hints that there is another way out: a return to Romanticism. Recently, this idea has been gaining steam. In 2023 Ted Gioia wrote an article that describes how the original Romantic movements formed as a response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Just as artists and Luddites chose humanity over technology and rationality back then, we could do the same today. This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds . How many of your friends are content with their relationship to technology? Zero?

As The Economist reports, this sentiment is already impacting the market. Vinyl sales are now high as they were in the late 1980s. Cassette tape sales in Britain are up two hundred percent year-over-year. The demand for film has doubled in half a decade. It is not a coincidence that the first edition of this magazine is coming out right as the computers threaten to take over.

Houellbecq is on the side of this new movement. Speaking to the Paris Review in 2010, he states that he is a Romantic, someone who has “a strong interest in the future… believes in unlimited happiness… [believes] in love… [and believes] in the soul.” Given his ostensible cynicism the interviewer is, understandably, incredulous. She doubles down, asking if he really, actually believes in boundless, permanent happiness. “Yes,” he replies. “And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.”

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