[In the following excerpt, Brookner discusses Houellebecq's controversial portrayal of sexual excesses and cloning in Les Particules élémentaires.]

The disgusting and depraved Les Particules élémentaires by Michel Houellebecq led to the author being suspended from a literary journal on grounds of offences against good taste. (The publicity did him no harm at all.) I liked this, though it is undoubtedly obscene, but, more than obscene, despairing. The sexual revolution to which the protagonist, Bruno, contributes, vigorously though unappealingly, is held responsible for the disillusionment which overtakes its adherents in middle age and beyond. The answer, says Houellebecq, or his other protagonist, Michel, is genetic modification. In future reproduction will be achieved by cloning. It was the eugenic implications of this idea which so offended the authorities, so that to have admitted this novel would be seen as an act of political incorrectness. Yet what is shocking about it is not the sexual extravagance, for which the author blames both New Age philosophies and orgiastic crypto-religious cults (not perhaps adequately documented), but the morose determinism with which he pursues both the addiction and its cure, or rather antidote. Not everyone will be able to follow this writer in his diagnosis of consumer-oriented sex, but not a few will agree with him in his stoical distaste for a phenomenon which has perhaps mutated from appetite to bulimia. His book won the Prix Novembre.