[In the following review, Berman explores Houellebecq's dark, unsavory cynicism and social criticism in The Elementary Particles, noting similarities with Honoré de Balzac's reactionary perspective.]

The narrator of Michel Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, or Extension of the Field of Struggle, visits a shrink, who diagnoses him with a grim-sounding condition called “depressive lucidity.” In Houellebecq's second novel, The Elementary Particles—the book that has aroused all kinds of controversies in France in the last couple of years, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and is bound to arouse its share of American controversies, too—a main character likewise visits a shrink. The same diagnosis is proposed: “depressive lucidity.” There is a pattern here. Now that I have read three volumes of Houellebecq's poetry, too, plus a collection of essays and prose poems, and have listened to his CD and his rock band, I feel confident in diagnosing “depressive lucidity” as the dominant condition afflicting whole aspects of this man's very strange writings and commentaries.

Depression does not make for an attractive or even a natural theme for a novel. The narrator of Extension du domaine de la lutte is a hopelessly isolated sad-sack computer technician in Paris who has no girlfriends, no friends except for an unhappy priest, no congenial workmates, no enthusiasm for his job, and no ability to savor anything that comes his way. The computer company sends him on a business trip to Rouen, where he sits in a cafe. A scary German dog ruins the atmosphere. A wedding procession passes through the street. The bride and groom turn out to be old and homely. The narrator orders a pizza. It tastes bad. He attends a porno movie. The hall is full of disgusting, masturbating exhibitionists. He falls ill. No one gives a damn about getting him to the hospital.

Life is narrow, dark, and acrid. And in The Elementary Particles things only get worse, unto the creepiest of sci-fi calamities. The novel's two protagonists, Michel and Bruno, half-brothers, grow from childhood into middle age with opposite personalities, neither of which proves to be even remotely adapted to the rigors of life. Michel, a timid scientific nerd, finds no pleasure in sex, is barely capable of love, and customarily lives in isolation. Bruno, an abrasive literary screwball, is a man who, when his mental state sags, masturbates in public, and, when his mental state recovers a bit, finds a fleeting pleasure by hanging out in sex clubs, in spite of how bad he feels about the modest size of his penis.

People commit suicide right and left, especially women. The gates of the mental institution are always yawning open. Only the weakest of threads ties one person to the next. You have to feel sorry for everyone involved, except for the people who are too detestable for pity. And you do have to wonder how even the most talented of writers could possibly work up ingredients as thin as these into a novel of any tastiness or texture. Novelists have lavished riches of literary skill on the topic of extreme economic impoverishment, but what can be done with extreme impoverishment in the realm of emotion? Every man is a millionaire in his emotions, Isaac Bashevis Singer said. But not in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. He himself acknowledges the difficulty in Extension du domaine de la lutte: “This progressive effacement of human relations is not without posing certain problems for the novel.”

But then, in Houellebecq's case, there is also the other half of his diagnosed depression, the “lucidity.” The lucidity in question turns out to be mostly abstract—the sort of crisp clarity in reasoning that is taught in philosophy classes. He theorizes on scientific and metaphysical themes—on the rarity and the unavoidability of mutation in chemicals and in organic life. He theorizes on history. He adopts, in The Elementary Particles, a doctrine out of Auguste Comte, and in good Comtean fashion sketches the stages of development which mankind has had to traverse, from primitive times through Christianity to the present epoch, with intimations of the catastrophic future.

He theorizes on the rise of individualism and on its sorry meaning for sex, love, and truth. You might wonder if an analytic lucidity on airy topics such as those can possibly suit a novel any better than does his bleak landscape of depressed isolated consciousness. For what is the purpose in writing novels? Isn't it to discover a middle terrain between the low-grounds of lonely, individual awareness and the heights of pure abstraction? Shouldn't a novel go tramping instead through the leafy trails of social existence, where people are husbands and wives and brothers and friends and enemies? Where life is verdant with facts and relations? But then, as I will not be the first to observe, the novel can do many things, and in the area of lucid theorizing Houellebecq can call on some noble precedents.

His character Bruno in The Elementary Particles composes a couple of outrageous racist essays about the inferiority of black men, “animals with big cocks and small reptilian brains,” and sends the essays to a famous novelist in Paris—who, in a bit of mischief, Houellebecq has named “Philippe Sollers,” though the real Sollers cannot be held accountable for anything that Houellebecq has done to him. The famous novelist responds warmly by saying to Bruno, “You're a real reactionary, that's good. All the great writers were reactionaries: Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoevsky.” That is a nice set of names, and listing them shows some gumption on Houellebecq's part, as a budding literary reactionary himself. Céline, too, would appear to be one of his ancestors, due to his bitterness and self-loathing (and his loathing for entire races of other people).

But in the matter of analytic lucidity, the name that leaps up from the reactionary list is surely Balzac's. I say Balzac partly because, in Houellebecq's volume of essays and prose poems, Rester vivant, or Staying Alive, he offers a compact and mildly rueful defense of The Human Comedy—of the fantastic energy in Balzac's characters, and the realism within Balzac's lack of realism. “After all,” says Houellebecq, “in life there remain real elements of melodrama. Above all, in the life of other people, elsewhere.” But mostly Balzac seems to me apposite because—as Houellebecq himself has pointed out in the oddly titled magazine Les Inrockuptibles, a hip publication—Balzac made a habit of theorizing lucidly on any number of themes, and doing it in a cool, detached style, like a scientist.

Balzac's theorizing led him to divide the whole of The Human Comedy into dry-sounding units called “Studies”—such as “Philosophical Studies”—quite as if he had written a series of research papers instead of novels. And what did Balzac say in those scientifically lucid reveries? In one of his “Philosophical Studies,” a tale called “The Search for the Absolute” (which Houellebecq doesn't mention in anything of his that I have read, but which seems to me loosely connected to The Elementary Particles), Balzac manages to speculate on a range of matters—from the diminishing variety of European culture and its reflection in architecture (a Houellebecqian theme), to the superior desirability of women with physical deformities, and onward to the deepest chemical elements of all existence and the possibility of finding our way, by means of scientific experiment, to the inmost secrets of life and the universe.

And none of that takes away from Balzac's art. On the contrary, you follow his philosophizing, and you feel that you are in contact with the manias of the writer himself, and not just those of his characters. You feel the intensity that drove him forward. In Balzac's case, that intensity was a doctrine about amorous passion. He wanted to postulate a world of untrammeled passion, especially the passion of husbands and wives for each other in good Catholic union, though he was willing to consider other combinations, too. He wanted to show that untrammeled passion is always being obstructed by some odious or irritating force.

And so he looked around, and set out to catalogue all the cheapening and obstructive aspects of the life of his time—to show us how awful are the greedy peasants, and how grotesque are the appalling Jews who have come to participate in French society, and how horrible are the workings of crass social climbing in an ambition-addled place like bourgeois Paris, not to mention in the provinces, and how dreadful are the uppity women who have lost their traditional sense of a woman's properly subservient role. He wanted to say, fie upon those many horrid modern things, fie upon the French life of his own times, fie upon modernity!

He wanted to show that, in some other era, emotions were purer and the flames of passion leaped higher. It was in earlier times, in the years before the French Revolution—in the age before that most terrible of crimes took place, the beheading of the king. For if there was any one act that tamped down the natural ardor between men and women, Balzac wanted to insist, it was the tragic decapitation of Louis XVI. Regicide undid the proper hierarchy of French society, and therefore of family life. Regicide ruined a civilization in which men were men and women were women—a civilization in which women trembled in adoration and even in fear of their haughty husbands, and men responded with manly confidence and zeal, and passion burned white. Balzac was a reactionary, in sum, because he was a Romantic.

Houellebecq's lucidity and scientific tone owe quite a bit to that sort of fantasizing, in an up-to-date version. Houellebecq knows that his characters are pathetic losers. He despises them. Bruno in The Elementary Particles becomes a high school teacher and exposes himself to one of his students, an act than which nothing could be more contemptible. But Houellebecq has a theory of how his characters have ended up in such a sorry pass. It is owing to the dreadful evolution of modern life. Things used to be better, years ago—in the age of aristocracy and romantic love.

In the aristocratic age, he says, “a man would 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.” Men were faithful. They looked to their children to carry on the family name and honor. The age of romantic love was especially wonderful. Houellebecq is a brave writer, normally speaking, and shows a studied indifference to how anyone will receive him. The New York Times Magazine sent a reporter his way, and he does seem to have enjoyed making an ass of himself. But for some reason, in his novels he affirms his points about aristocracy and romantic love in a timid spirit, as if even he, the earnest reactionary, cannot help fretting about looking silly.

On the delicate topic of aristocracy, Houellebecq's narrator affirms that, despite the terrible things that you may have heard about inequality and oppression under feudal regimes, the humble social classes in those days were by no means denied access to the aristocracy's noble doctrine of family life: “Merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea.” The narrator concedes that, in regard to romantic love, the relation between the sexes has not always achieved an ideal balance. Arranged marriages do not attract his admiration. And when did the custom of arranging marriages come to an end? It was in the 1950s. Only, a pity, the end of arranged marriages was followed all too quickly by the onslaught of sexual liberation. And so, as a result, “it would be fair to say that the late 1950s and early 1960s were the ‘golden age of romantic love’—a time we remember today through the songs of Jean Ferrat and early Françoise Hardy.”

In contrast to Balzac, who postulated as his Good Old Days the many centuries of Ancien Régime before the tragic beheading of 1793, Houellebecq's Good Old Days of aristocracy and romantic love appear to have lasted about five years, from circa 1958, which happens to be the year of his own birth, to 1963 or thereabouts. He does not mean to be funny about this. But it strikes me that hardly anyone today seems capable of laying out a properly reactionary yearning for times past without hitting a slightly ridiculous note. How else to explain the comic tone, wholly unintended, that you find in a certain kind of conservative magazine today, in America as much as in France—the Allan Bloom problem, you might call it, where the author means to be a terrible scourge, only to end up thumping an indignant pinky on the table?

Houellebecq's absurdity will have to be excused, then. He does mean to be serious. And with his several ideas about aristocracy and romantic love in place, he tears into his attack. He says that modern science may have solved the problems of material well-being, but material success has only unleashed a new problem. It has unleashed the modern individual, who is driven by the fear of death and by a sense of self to assert a final impulse: “the need to feel superior to the others.” The need comes out as personal competition for money and especially for sex—even though you might have supposed that, under conditions of material plenty, economic and sexual competition would, both of them, have been rendered pointless. But not at all. The knives are out.

Houellebecq, in short, is an anti-liberal. He makes the kind of argument that any number of philosophers and social critics have been making in France for fifty years now. He thinks the bonds of community have snapped. He thinks the sense of morality and good judgment has evaporated, and that people have been left in a wretched isolation, blind to the sources of their unhappiness. And what are those sources? Here Houellebecq sets himself apart. The French Marxists of long ago used to blame capitalism, and the post-structuralists used to blame the anonymous eternal structures of anthropology, and more recently a certain kind of pessimistic French liberal has chosen to blame the whole thrust of world history. Somebody has to be at fault. Houellebecq blames the radicals of the '60s.

He tells us that Michel and Bruno, the nerd and the sex maniac in The Elementary Particles, are the sons of Janine, an enthusiastic sex cultist of the 1950s and 1960s. Janine lived the ideas that came filtering into Europe from the wilder reaches of California and Esalen and the communalism of Aldous Huxley. She was friskily promiscuous in the name of spiritual depth, and took no concern for her little boys, who were brought up by their grandmothers. And this merry irresponsibility of hers, apart from being dreadful for her own children, played its part in the growth of a horrendous murder cult, in the style of Charles Manson, something truly demonic. So the brothers are victims. They grow up as wounded souls. They are the products of hippie madness. And they are furious at their mother. She lies on her deathbed, and Bruno not very prettily calls her an old whore.

On the other hand, when Houellebecq briefly awards to Bruno, the great masturbator, some small experience of love and happiness, the angel in Bruno's life turns out to be a tender hearted, middle-aged, hippie earth-mother, who responds to his troubles by saying things like, “I know what we should do. … We should go and have an orgy on the nudist beach at the Cap d'Agde. You get a lot of Dutch nurses and German businessmen there. … You need a holiday too, and you need to get off with a lot of different women.” So Bruno ends up with a girl just like dear old Mom, whose spirit of sexual adventure is revealed to have its nurturing side, after all.

This is the little twist that makes Houellebecq a novelist and not a pamphleteer. But then, he does have his ideas, and the hippie earth-mother suffers a medical catastrophe in the course of getting gang-banged, and suicide is, as always, the result. So the accusatory finger remains in place, not just in The Elementary Particles but in nearly everything I have read by Houellebecq. He wants to show that people like dear old Mom paved the way for the hippie masses of the 1960s and 1970s. And the hippies, together with the political radicals, wreaked the horrors of modern individualism upon mankind. They did it by breaking up the old system of moral restraints and the heritage of aristocracy and romantic love, in the name of their hopeless ideal of egalitarian love and plenty for all.

Taken as a work of social criticism, then, The Elementary Particles, together with Houellebecq's other writings, offers a variation on what in America, at least, has become a well-known accusation. It is the conservative accusation against the '60s generation, the complaint that, in the name of high-minded ideals, the radicals of some thirty years ago ripped out the guts of simple morality, and the normal functionings of society have been a shambles ever since. This aspect of The Elementary Particles (together with the sex-club scenes, of course) accounts for most of the sensation that Houellebecq has made in France. Only, in Houellebecq's variation, the accusation goes even further than what the American conservatives have proposed. This is because, in France, the '60s generation is blamed for undermining sexual morality, general morality, social hierarchy, home, church, and school. And it is blamed for advocating leftist economic ideas.

But most of all it is blamed for the non-leftist market ideas of the 1980s. That decade may have been the right-wing Age of Reagan in the United States, but it was also the left-wing Age of Mitterrand in France, under a socialist government full of veterans of the student barricades of twenty years before; and in both countries, market values and consumer merchandising began to triumph over older, venerated ideas about social life. In the United States, the '60s generation is blamed for being anti-American, but in France the same generation is blamed for being “insufficiently” anti-American—sometimes even for demonstrating an unseemly appreciation for the American popular arts and for America's spirit of innovation. In France, nobody has idolized California's Silicon Valley more than the aging heroes of 1968.

And so, when Houellebecq rails against the '60s generation in France, he is making a larger, more general complaint than America's tub-thumping neoconservatives like to make about the left-wing radicals in the United States. He is complaining about the whole trend of modern life, not just a single tendency. He is complaining about the triumph of the market. And he is complaining about America and its influence.

He resents the evil tone of America's feminists and of feminism generally. He resents the shadow cast by America's demonic hippies on their French counterparts. He attributes the sexual revolution in France to America's popular arts, not just from the evil '60s and '70s. In the course of his two novels he draws a distinction between the malign influence of Marilyn Monroe and that of Brigitte Bardot, who, for reasons that I cannot quite follow, strikes Houellebecq as rather more sympathetic. Janine, the evil mother, goes so far as to rename herself Jane, just to emphasize the American connection.

He complains about the rise of uniformity, which strikes him as an American trait (just as it struck Balzac as a French trait). He blames the Americans for his own obsession with the size of his penis, since the habit of measuring penises derives, in his imagining, from the manias of American pornography, which derive from what he takes to be the American mania for measuring and classifying all things. (America, land of Descartes.) He blames America for his own bad experiences on the internet. You have to laugh at Houellebecq's account, in Rester vivant, of how unhappy he has been, looking for sex partners on the Internet:

Finally, ANNIE doesn't respond any more; has she attained the enchanted summits of mutual desire? So much the better for her, so much the better for her. I settle for SANDRA W. and we begin to chat gently. Everything goes well. Everything goes very well. Packets of numeralized information circulate through the optic fibers with the speed of light. … All is well. I think of Albert Gore, Vice President of the United States, and the initiator of an ambitious project of a multimedia network permitting the transference of ‘voice, text, data, images,’ throughout the American continent. When his project is working, will I be able to hear my interlocutor? Will I be able to masturbate for her in front of a video camera?

But then, having wrapped an American flag around the cheapness of his experience, he goes on, undismayed, to borrow a few bracing and strident tones from the American accusation against the '60s, and to send them ringing through his own accusation. He likes to say that the radicalism of those satanic times dealt blows to the “Judeo-Christian” culture, which has about it the sound of an American politician. (“Judeo-Christian” wasn't Charles Maurras's idea of traditional culture, or Céline's.) In The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq invents a California Republican named Macmillan who has written a wild tract against hippies called, in French, Génération Meurtre, or Murder Generation, arguing that Charles Manson was the truest hippie of all, and serial murderers are the hippie legacy—all of which might bring to mind a real-life right-wing California tract of a few years ago called Destructive Generation, which made similarly bizarre and extravagant claims (mixed with a few good points) about the political radicals of the time. It's worth bearing in mind that Houellebecq's first book, published in 1991, was a study of the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. So Houellebecq, the anti-American, does have his American dimension.

And then, on top of his sillier, wild-eyed views, the novel piles on a few opinions that are positively repulsive, not just in connection to the black race and the black penis. Houellebecq seems to recoil viscerally from signs of aging in women. Nothing strikes him as more horrible than a hippie chick beginning to sag around the edges. In The Elementary Particles, all of these views point, at last, to a sci-fi nightmare of the future. You slowly realize that the story of Michel and Bruno has been written as some sort of formal history in the futuristic aftermath of a biological cataclysm. I will not describe the cataclysm, except to note the parallel between Michel's genetic studies in The Elementary Particles, in collaboration with a scientist unpronounceably named Hubczejak, and the chemical studies of Balzac's hero, Balthazar, in “The Search for the Absolute,” in collaboration with a scientist named Wierzchnownia. Except that, in Balzac, the efforts of Balthazar-Wierzchnownia to get at the heart of all existence come to naught, whereas in Houellebecq the efforts of Michel-Hubczejak lead to … but you will have to discover that for yourself.

Balzac, being a genius, knew how to keep his theorizing and his cast of characters in proper balance, and how to keep everything aloft on ebullient clouds of enthusiasm. Houellebecq, the depressive, cannot do that. The Elementary Particles is an ambitious novel, filled with wild ideas on the biggest of theological and historical themes. And it is built around a complicated frame, with two protagonists and a mysterious sci-fi narrator looking back on current times from a standpoint in the future, and a few hints of Catholic mysticism thrown in, for additional confusion. But the big ideas and the complicated structure are a lot to hang on Houellebecq's thin and saturnine characters. So the novel does end up as something of a pamphlet, too ponderous in its ideas and theories to succeed fully as a novel, too cranky to take seriously as a pamphlet. The translation by Frank Wynne is fluent and natural-sounding, though I notice that Wynne has now and then clouded the clarity of the cranky ideas. Extension du domaine de la lutte, which appeared in 1994, is a much less ambitious book—a thin novel, that only hints at larger thoughts. But the smaller ambitions are more neatly packaged.

There is something original about Houellebecq, though, even at his worst. It is obvious enough in the novels, and in the poetry and everything else he does, too. You might suppose that, with his sexual desperation, his rage at market societies, his hatred for his parents, and his several other bleak and bitter themes, Houellebecq's poetry would race down the page in a jagged, broken-metered rant, like the young Allen Ginsberg heading for a touchdown. But not at all. Houellebecq expresses himself in formal, even antique verse forms, with a slightly hortatory tone, rather like Victor Hugo. He is not exactly a master of technique. His ear trips him up every two or three lines. Still, you can't help marveling at how Houellebecq sticks to what are supposed to be smooth and creamy verse structures, even while heaping curses on his dying father or raging about the inequalities of love—as in his book La poursuite du bonheur, or The Pursuit of Happiness:

Dans un ciné porno, des retraités
          poussifs
Contemplaient, sans y croire,
Les ébats mal filmés de deux couples
          lascifs;
Il n'y avait pas d'histoire.
Et voilà, me disais-je, le visage de
          l'amour,
L'authentique visage.
Certains séduisants; ils séduisent
          toujours,
Et les autres surnagent.
In a porno theater, the wheezy retirees
Were watching, without believing,
The badly filmed frolics of lascivious
          couples.
There was no story.
And there, I thought, is the face of love,
The authentic face.
Some people seductive; they always
          seduce,
And the others float along.

Where you do see his best is in the prose-poems and essays. The essays are short, about the length of a one-page piece in a magazine. Some of them were written, in fact, for Les Inrockuptibles and other magazines. They are composed in a sullen tone, which he controls more carefully and consistently than in the novels and more gracefully than in his verse. The essays express a full-scale attitude, if not quite the whole of a personality.

He is angry. He is disenchanted. He belongs to a party, though it is not exactly a political party, not even the party of the dream-filled extreme right. He disavows any ideological affiliation of that sort, for all the satisfaction he takes in his own prejudices. “Partisanship makes for happiness, and you shouldn't be happy,” he says. He belongs, instead, to the gloomy, acrid party—the party of sulphur. “You are on the side of misfortune; you are the somber party.” And he expresses his sulphurous attitude forcefully, even movingly.

If the world is composed of suffering it is because the world is essentially free. Suffering is the necessary consequence of the free play of the parts of the system. You should know that, and say so.

It will not be possible for you to transform suffering into the goal. Suffering is, and cannot by consequence become a goal.

In the wounds that it inflicts on us, life alternates between the brutal and the insidious. Know those two forms. Practice them. Acquire a complete familiarity with them. Distinguish what separates them, and what brings them together. Many contradictions will then be resolved. Your voice will gain strength and amplitude.

Due to the characteristics of the modern epoch, love can hardly be seen anymore; but the ideal of love has not gotten smaller. Being fundamentally situated out of time, like all ideals, it cannot shrink or disappear.

Thus a particularly flagrant ideal-real discordance, source of particularly rich sufferings.

Houellebecq has not wandered into unknown territory in saying these things. But there is something new in his tone. It derives from an amazing absence in his attitude. He is not ironic. He does not hold up sixteen mirrors to admire his own attitudes from ten thousand angles. He does not laugh at himself, or snicker, or even curl his lip, except sometimes. He despises irony. He despises the notion of relative truths. “Poetry is a way of establishing definitive moral truths. You should hate liberty with all your strength. Truth is scandalous, but without it, nothing has any worth.” And so he wants you to discover what is true. “Your deepest mission is to dig toward the Truth. You are the gravedigger, and the corpse.” He says, “An honest and naïve vision of the world is already a masterpiece.”

Houellebecq seems to me honest. He is definitely naïve. Even so, he hasn't written any masterpieces. I sincerely hope that not many people will turn to him for political and sociological insights (though they will, they will). But that tone of his, his oddly lucid whine and shriek, do get under your skin. He is not pallid, he is not a shade of himself. The man is a bit demented, but he is, recognizably, a man, and of the present moment, too.