SOURCE: Cloonan, William. “Literary Scandal, Fin du Siècle, and the Novel in 1999.” French Review 74, no. 1 (October 2000): 14-30.

[In the following essay, Cloonan examines the public controversy surrounding Les Particules élémentaires, Houellebecq's literary celebrity and artistic merit, and how “L'Affaire Houellebecq” sheds light on the state of French letters, culture, and intellectual debate at the end of the twentieth century.]

In Paris this summer an editor at the Editions du Seuil complained that the rentrée of 1998 had been dominated, and to a degree spoiled by the attention given to one novel. She was referring, of course, to Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires, which was mentioned in last year's French Review essay. In the ensuing months a controversy emerged, provoked in large measure by Houellebecq's former collaborators at the review Perpendiculaire, that was rapidly christened l'Affaire Houellebecq. The very name given the scandal points to its central ambiguity: was the novel problematic, or was it rather the man who wrote it? Of course, probably nobody would take a literary scandal seriously if it did not have strong personal elements. The Perpendiculaire group obliged by offering a particularly faint form of praise when they somewhat begrudgingly allowed that Houellebecq “n'est pas nazi; il n'est même pas lépiniste” (Duchatelet et al. 16). Houellebecq was equally sparing in his compliments when he referred to one of his former collaborators at the review as “un imbécile hargenux … à qui je n'ai jamais caché le peu d'estime que m'inspiraient ses productions” (“Michel Houellebecq répond à Perpendiculaire” 10).¹

If there is one area in which French intellectuals are absolutely superior to their American counterparts, it is in their interest in and use of the media. L'Affaire proved to be a godsend as writers of various political persuasions and artistic ability rapidly jumped into print. The birth of a new literary school was announced, the decline of morality decried, and, as tends to happen fairly frequently, humanism was once again pronounced dead. By the summer of 1999 the scandal was already on the wane, but the review Atelier du Roman nevertheless devoted a large portion of its June edition to L'Affaire.

As this essay hopes to show, L'Affaire Houellebecq is less interesting for the intellectual substance of the debates surrounding the author and his novel than for what it indicates about the malaise currently affecting French letters as the century ends. Whatever one thinks of Les Particules élémentaires, there is nothing in the novel, either thematically or descriptively, that cannot also be found in other works. To take but three examples, some people are offended by the rampant sexuality in Les Particules, but in fact the partouze has become a staple of contemporary French fiction as Alice Massat's Le Ministère de l'intérieur amply illustrates. As for the alleged misanthropy of Houellebecq and his work, Vincent de Swarte's Requiem pour un sauvage, set in the Middle Ages, tells the story of a man who spends his youth in a cave, emerges, meets people, eats several of them, participates in a Crusade, and eventually returns to his cave. In Lorette Nobécourt's La Conversation, the female protagonist's curiosity about what makes men tick prompts her to attempt to skin her lover alive. What emerges in Les Particules is an indictment of a generation, the sacrosanct generation of '68, which, the novel implies, has failed to produce a better society, a moral code superior to the earlier humanistic model, and, perhaps most tellingly, great works of art.²

Les Particules élémentaires was Houellebecq's second novel. His first, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), attracted serious critical attention. It deals with an extremely depressed young man struggling against loneliness and the temptation of suicide. From the perspective of L'Affaire Houellebecq, it is perhaps most interesting for the way it announces one of the stylistic devices the author would adopt in Les Particules: “La forme romanesque n'est pas conçue pour peindre l'indifférence, ni le néant; il faudrait inventer une articulation plus plate, plus concise et plus morne” (Extension 42).

Houellebecq was fortunate to have caught the attention of critics from the beginning of his career as a novelist. New novelists are numerous and often quickly forgotten. In 1999 there were seventy-five first novels. Frédéric Richaud published Monsieur le jardinier, a loving and lovely account of the life of Louis XIV's gardener, Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie, whose reflections on his activities become a long meditation on transience. Jean-Baptiste escapes his demons by turning to the soil; the heroine of Marion Jean's Trouée is less fortunate. Her efforts to deal with the passage of time lead her into a world that resembles that of The Sun Also Rises, where broken souls move constantly about in an effort to avoid confronting the sterility of their lives. Alain Fleischer's La Femme qui avait deux bouches is the first venture into fiction of a man who has had a long and distinguished career in the visual arts. This book is actually a collection of short pieces, heavily influenced by Kafka. The title refers to the first story which does indeed focus on a beautiful and brilliant woman with two mouths. Given Fleischer's university background and interest in theory, it is not surprising that the mouths in question at times take on the attributes of literary texts, at once troubling and seductive, yet always fascinating. Jean-Philippe Chatrier's Les Deux Moitiés du ciel is an ambitious work that centers on a love triangle of a peculiar sort, a man, a woman, and a church. The man, Henri Deleuze, must choose, and it is a tribute to Chatrier's talent that his choice of Reims cathedral makes perfect sense.

This year les Editions Arléa created a special series for first novels, “ler mille.,” and Arléa has also made some excellent choices. Christine Féret-Fleury's Les Vagues sont douces comme des tigres is the story of a twelve-year-old girl living on a farm during World War I. Although this is a third-person narration, the reader never feels or sees anything beyond what the protagonist does. The story deals with the child's loneliness, need for love, and efforts to overcome both through schooling. In Neige Maxence Fermine attempts to create what might be termed a “haiku-novel.” This beautiful story is set in eighteenth-century Japan. The novel, wherein no chapter is longer than a page, tells the story of Yuko-Akita, whose twin passions are haiku and snow. A gifted poet, his struggle is to overcome a fascination with whiteness, and when he does so, he enhances his existence as an artist and a man.

Claude Pinganaud is the editor at Arléa who launched the collection, “ler mille.” Yet as he noted “publier un premier roman est … moins risqué pour un éditeur que de publier le deuxième car les journalistes sont plus attentifs, plus enthousiastes et plus indulgents” (Grangeray 4). The second novel is always harder because critics await the fulfillment of the putative promise noted in the first. Michèle Desbordes certainly meets this challenge in La Demande which describes the last days of “un maître italien” invited to France by the king. The “maître” is certainly Leonardo Da Vinci whose final months on earth are eased by the care and love of a simple servant woman. This novel proved an unexpected popular success which, in a work containing few incidents, can perhaps be attributed to the continuous intermingling of a fading present and an uncertain future. The reader shares the artist's recognition that his genius will permit him to overcome everything but the inevitable, and nowhere is this awareness more intense than in the act of creating: “quand l'émotion est arrivée, il ne pouvait savoir si c'était ce qu'il voyait ou la mort qui maintenant sans rien dire, chaque soir à la même heure, il sentait venir” (38).

Danielle Robert-Guédon's second novel, Le Grand Abbatoir, draws the sad analogy between “un abbatoir” and “une maison de retraite.” The decent people who run “Val Fleuri” insist that it is not “une maison de retraite, c'est un lieu de vie à taille humaine, avec un accompagnement personnalisé. Satisfaire les résidents est notre priorité” (104-05). The residents, however, are not so pleased to be there, as are not, one assumes, the cattle entering the slaughterhouse. Marianne Dubertret published her first novel in 1984 when she was a teenager. Her second, Un Faux Frère, is the dark love story of a boy and girl who were brought up together because Marc's parents took Ava in as an orphan. Eventually they become lovers only later to discover that among the things they share are the same father.

Last year readers discovered Iegor Gran's talent for the burlesque and the bizarre with Ipso facto. This year Gran offers Acné festival, which alludes to the first novel (172) in the process of telling the story of a man almost sixty who suffers from acne, “un symptôme de mon manque d'affection” (64). His efforts to turn this affliction into a seduction device and ultimately into a work of art is the subject of this novel.

In 1998 Iegor Gran found himself unwittingly implicated in L'Affaire Houellebecq. Up until October of that year L'Affaire had been a nasty, but localized quarrel between the editors of Perpendiculaire and a former collaborator, Michel Houellebecq. Perpendiculaire was founded in 1995, and rapidly established itself as a leftist review concerned with the relationship between literature, politics, and society. Houellebecq was an early contributor and probably its best-known writer. Excerpts from Les Particules élémentaires had initially appeared in the review's pages. Political differences precipitated the break between Houellebecq and the editorial staff of the journal with the editors claiming that the misanthropic, antiabortionist, reactionary views expressed in Les Particules are in fact those of the author. Houellebecq, who is certainly a talented provocateur, provided his detractors with ample ammunition. In a series of essays and interviews that appeared in various places and were collected under the title Interventions (1998), he opposes the Maastricht Treaty (118), maintains that May 1968 was a failure (78), and takes a position squarely against “la débauche de techniques mise en œuvre par tel ou tel ‘formaliste-Minuit,’” (53). His tone is often belligerent as the title of one essay, “Jacques Prévert est un con,” demonstrates. During an interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles that does not appear in Interventions, he reportedly expressed his admiration for Stalin “parce qu'il a tué plein d'anarchistes” (Van Reuterghen 17), and in a meeting with students at the FNAC, he so annoyed his young listeners that some of the audience responded with “Vous êtes un nazi qui ne s'avoue pas” (Van Reuterghen 17). Houellebecq's gift for the outrageous interview is such that Van Reuterghen, whose Le Monde article I have been citing, quite properly remarks that “plutôt que d'interroger l'écrivain sur son œuvre, on l'interroge sur l'interview précédente” (17).

It was Frédéric Badré who dragged Iegor Gran into the fray and by doing so gave L'Affaire a broader, potentially more interesting dimension. Badré works for a rival review, Ligne de Risque, which takes its inspiration from Lautréamont, and therefore wishes “Que la situation explose.” Nevertheless this journal refuses to participate “dans la guerre sociale” (Kéchichian 8). In an article that appeared in Le Monde Badré rehearsed the usual complaints about the contemporary French novel, “trop narcissique, trop autarcique, trop introverti, sans nécessité, tourné vers le passé, etc.” (14). He then announced the discovery of a new “school”: “avec Michel Houellebecq, Marie Darrieussecq, Iegon Gran.” There is “une nouvelle tendance … leurs livres ont un grand succès public … leur radicalité ne repose pas sur la face obscure et cachée des choses, mais sur la réalité commune, sur ce que tout le monde voit autour de lui” (14). Badré argued that these writers, whose “school” he baptized “postnaturaliste,” nevertheless do not follow an established path, and then made the rather fabulous claim that “ils ont compris que la beauté ne peut plus être représentée parce qu'elle n'existe plus” (14). In a calmer moment Badré added that “le roman est pour eux un simple outil pour dévoiler les contradictions de la société contemporaine et montrer l'homme en situation devant l'intolérable vide” (14).

Despite the somewhat hyperbolic tone of the essay, Badré did raise some worthwhile issues. He was arguing that certain younger novelists were moving away from the sorts of literary experimentation simplistically associated with Les Editions de Minuit, and were attempting to engage in a straightforward description of the moral and social ethos of the contemporary world. Whether or not these writers were indeed trying to “renouer la littérature … avec un discours universel” (14) is probably less important than that they were certainly doing something different. On a social level they were more interested in describing what was wrong with the world than in changing it, and, more arguably, in terms of literary technique they were more involved in what they said than in how they said it. Finally, even though Badré links Darrieussecq and Gran with Houellebecq, it was Houellebecq who received the bulk of the attention in the essay. By virtue of Badré's article, the author of Les Particules élémentaires was anointed the leader of a “school” that someone else had founded.

The issue of “postnaturalism” and Houellebecq's putative involvement with it provoked a variety of predictable reactions, but L'Affaire took yet another bizarre turn when Les Particules was unceremoniously dropped from the short list of the 1998 Goncourt selection. No clear explanation was ever provided for this decision, but if nothing else it points to the nastiness and backbiting that increasingly characterizes the awarding of the major literary prizes.

Unfortunately, this year that unpleasant tendency continued. Jean Echenoz was awarded the Goncourt for Je m'en vais. Echenoz is undoubtedly one of France's most interesting novelists, even if some readers may be disappointed with his latest effort. Je m'en vais, much like his preceding Un An, takes place over the course of one year. Félix Ferrer, an owner of an art gallery, leaves his wife in the first sentence: “Je m'en vais” (7), gets involved in a series of improbable adventures that lead him to Alaska in search of Indian artifacts, then returns to France with his treasures, only to have them stolen. Eventually he recovers most of the loot, gets rich, and on the last page he is once again at his now ex-wife's house, where he meets an attractive young woman. He agrees to spend some time with her, but, like all his relations with women, this will prove of short duration. He makes this clear to her: “Je prends juste un verre et je m'en vais” (253). This novel reprises many of the themes of Echenoz's earlier work (travel to out-of-the way places, the influence of American movies on contemporary life, and the unlikely made to appear normal), but, to this reader at least, Je m'en vais seems a bit tired, almost as if the writer is parodying himself. However, the unpleasantness surrounding the Goncourt had nothing to do with Echenoz's novel or any individual's opinion of it.

The Goncourt committee shocked the literary prize establishment by announcing the winner almost a week in advance. This unexpected timing threw the other prize committees into disarray, especially the Femina, which had Echenoz on its short list as well. The Goncourt committee apparently opted to upset the usual calendar since other committees had been doing that for years, and as a result, the Goncourt, considered to be the most prestigious, has in recent years become the last major prize awarded.

Whatever the chagrin the Femina people might have experienced at the Goncourt's conduct, it did not prevent their awarding their prize to a fine writer. Maryline Desbiolles's Anchise is the sad story of a man whose life ended practically before it began. Anchise lost his wife to sickness while he was away at war, and this “cinglé, ce fou, ce pauvre con d'Anchise n'avait jamais pu oublier sa femme” (42). The story begins with his death, and recounts the story of a life that would appear uneventful to most, but which was marked forever by one event.

The Médicis went to another deserving novelist. For years Christian Oster has been entertaining readers with stories that usually feature a Gallic version of J. Alfred Prufrock. Gavarine is no exception, and he recounts in Oster's latest novel the sad/funny unraveling of his life because, as he explains, he has lost the keys to Mon Grand Appartement.

Daniel Picouly won the Renaudot for L'Enfant léopard which tells of Marie-Antoinette's final twelve hours. Her one remaining wish is to see again the illegitimate child she produced with “le nègre Zamor.” The child suffers from a skin disease which gives him the appearance of an “enfant léopard.” Jean-Christophe Ruffin's Les Causes perdues, which describes a humanitarian mission in Ethiopia, received the Interallié.

However much civility may be suffering in the awarding of the major prizes, one prize tradition remains unscathed. The major prizes are pretty much the exclusive property of major publishing houses. Gallimard got the Interallié. Seuil received the Femina, and Grasset won the Renaudot. The venerable editor in chief, Jérome Lindon, probably would not wish to agree, but when his Minuit walks off with the Goncourt and the Médicis, avant-garde publishing may be moving into the mainstream.

Mathieu Lindon, the editor's son, published a novel this year with one of France's most adventurous houses, Les Editions P.O.L. Le Procès de Jean-Marie Le Pen has many fine qualities, notably the indictment, less of Le Pen since that would be obvious, but rather of the Left's ineptness in confronting him. The story deals with a young lépeniste who committed a racist crime, an act which engenders the predictable anti-Le Pen out-bursts from minority groups and leftist intellectuals. The murderer, Ronald Blistier, is not particularly intelligent or eloquent, but before his absolute conviction of white supremacy and of his own role as the real victim, his opponents are at a loss to respond. The boy eventually commits suicide, but neither his life nor death seems very important in this novel. What matters for the novelist is how such hateful views could become dogma for a growing number of people. The trial of Jean-Marie Le Pen never takes place in this novel, but in a sentence Lindon captures the essence of Le Pen's strategy: “dire en public le minimum de mots pour provoquer le maximum de mal” (26).

Robert Bober's Berg et Beck deals with another historical issue that remains important in contemporary France. Berg and Beck are two Jewish boys forced to wear the yellow star of David in 1942. Berg survives and his friend disappears. In 1952 Berg takes a job in an orphanage for the children of déportés. He does his best to help these kids, to ease their transition into normal lives, but he remains himself a victim, guilty of his own survival.

Marc Lambron's 1941 treats World War II from a very different perspective. It centers on the Vichy government as viewed by a minor official who secretly works for the Resistance. The issue is the much discussed question of how decent patriotic French people ought to have reacted. Lambron provides a brilliant characterization of the mood at Vichy: the mixture of optimism, fear, occasional self-hatred, constant insecurity and self-justification: “L'esprit partisan mal placé, les activités défaitistes, l'hostilité au Maréchal, l'entrave à l'œuvre de la restauration nationale, non merci!” (103). Lebrun's descriptions of members of Pétain's entourage are particularly striking. Take, for example, the Maréchal's personal physician, Bernard Ménétral who projects: “un air de vieil enfant qui a trop applaudi au Guignol” (119). Equally memorable are his evocations of the arrogance of the Vichy intellectual elite: “l'Ecole Normale ne donne pas une éducation, elle se contente de conférer l'infaillibilité” (325). Despite the enormous differences in style, this novel reads at times like an ominous prelude to Céline's depictions of the same world in defeat that one finds in his war trilogy. Lebrun draws many conclusions about Vichy in 1941, but none are intended as final, as his last sentences indicate: “La mèche brûle … Elle n'a pas fini de brûler” (412).

Alexandre Najjar's L'Ecole de la guerre deals with a more recent conflict, the on and off war in Lebanon. It is a series of vignettes that details the survival strategies, “en temps de guerre, la bougie est sans prix” (59), employed by people who are never really sure where the battlefield begins and ends. In his eloquent introduction Najjar claims that all “guerres se ressemblent” (11), but then in his novel he demonstrates that every war is unique for its victims.

This year's final novel centering on warfare is in some ways the strangest. Over the years Jean Vautrin has perfected the mingling of comic book characters with serious issues. His Le Cri du peuple is no exception. As the title suggests, it deals with the Commune of 1870-1871. The novel's cover has a comic book version of a battle around a barricade, and the author provides in the text drawings that caricature the main characters. His hero, Horace Grondin, is appropriately larger-than-life: “Cet homme aux mains d'échorcheur, à l'ossature puissante, au regard halluciné, cet homme qui faisait sa route seul au monde, paraissait tellement hors du commun” (52). Yet this novel is not easy reading. The descriptions of the brutality, the battles throughout Paris, and the ultimate defeat of the Commune are not for the fainthearted. If Vautrin's novels often seem odd to American readers, it is doubtless because we have nothing in our literary tradition that permits our taking the comic book as a serious artistic form capable of making compelling comments on the present and the past.

A similar difference in the evaluation of literary forms affects the American and French appreciation of the mystery novel. Americans have always admired certain mystery novelists as writers, Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes are obvious examples, but have tended to view the genre as a secondary one. In contrast, at least since World War II the French have given increasing importance to the polar. While it is true that some nouveaux romanciers, such as Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet, may have freighted the form with more intellectual baggage than it can bear, the mystery novel remains in France a vehicle for serious social commentary.

Last year Michel Rio interrupted his La Mort to decry the perceived abuses of literary theory and historical revisionism. This year Marek Halter addresses the ethnic and cultural tensions in the Middle East with Les Mystères de Jérusalem. This novel mingles greed for lucre and for knowledge, sex, violence, and murder in a story whose ostensible theme, the search for lost treasure, provides the basis for a bitterly ironic commentary on the absurdity of the mutual hatred between Arab and Jew.

Of course, if the French are willing to take the mystery novel seriously, they do not do so all the time. Lovers of the genre who simply appreciate its diverting qualities would be well-advised to consider Fred Vargas's L'Homme à l'envers. Fred Vargas is not sufficiently known in the States. A scientist by profession, she consistently supplies compelling stories of great tension and minimum violence. Her latest effort tells of a series of murders in Southern France that appear to be the work of a werewolf. The story is gripping, the ending surprising, and those who think the French undervalue the intelligence, indeed the cunning, of Canadians will have to revisit the question.

Although Michel Rio has often displayed great talent for the parodic mystery novel, he does not limit himself to his genre. His Morgane is the story of Morgane la Fée. More beautiful than any other woman, more intelligent than all men except perhaps Merlin, early in life she declares war on humanity, on the violence of men and the cruelty of their God. Her credo speaks for itself: “Et moi, Morgane, … haïssant ce Dieu-Monstre et cet homme stupide ou menteur … je veux être cruelle à mon tour et répondre par le mal personnel au mal universel, parce que je suis condamnée au savoir; à la peur, à la souffrance et à la mort” (33). In the fin du siècle climate of 1999, it is hard not to find in this retelling of the collapse of the Round Table as well as in Morgane's own solitary demise, a commentary on a civilization that has lost its bearings.

Rio explains in his introduction that Morgane is to a degree a spin-off from his earlier Merlin (1989). He is not the only prominent novelist who cannot quite escape his prior successes, but no author so illustrates that dilemma as does Daniel Pennac. Whether he likes it or not, Pennac remains a prisoner of la famille Malaussène. Critics might suggest new departures, but the public cannot seem to get enough of the comic universe he has created in Belleville. Aux fruits de la passion will certainly please the lovers of “Further Adventures.” This time Ben's sister, Thèrese the fortune-teller, embarks on an ill-advised marriage with Marie-Colbert de Robertval. The Belleville community had enough trouble trying to understand why she wanted to marry a comptable, but when the guy turns out to be a comte, not to mention the other “c” word, the dire results are all too foreseeable. After the wedding, where the Belleville guests provide for their social superiors the appropriately politically correct element, “humbles et multiculturels” (91), mayhem ensues; some characters are murdered, one explodes, and the surprise beginning is matched by a surprise ending. As with each installment of the Belleville saga, Pennac manages his unique form of social commentary. This time the deep thinking is supplied by a dog: “Julius le Chien pratiquait la politique à la française: il s'attaquait aux images pour mieux pactiser avec les personnes” (42). Pennac will decide for himself when and if he wishes to leave the nineteenth arrondissement. For the moment one can only say that Aux fruits de la passion is one of his better efforts.

The pressure on a writer to address certain issues and avoid others, to change locales or philosophies is simply ridiculous. What matters is what an author does with his/her materials, and such an obvious conclusion is as true for Houellebecq as it is for Pennac. The most glaring absurdity in L'Affaire Houellebecq is the concentration, not simply on the man, but on his most outrageous and at times Orphic utterances. In fact, in Interventions Houellebecq has made some clear statements about his goals as a writer and positioned his concerns in the context of contemporary French literature. He argues, for instance, that “Je ne me situe ni pour ni contre aucune avant-garde, mais je me rends compte que je me singularise par le simple fait que je m'intéresse moins au langage qu'au monde” (110-11). While one might seriously doubt that avant-garde experimentation is necessarily apolitical, what matters more is that Houellebecq believes strongly, perhaps even naively, in literature's capacity to change the world: “on souhaite dépasser le cynisme. Si quelqu'un aujourd'hui parvient à développer un discours à la fois honnête et positif, il modifiera le monde” (111). A negative view of society's current direction need not be a cynical one, and to image such an attitude in a novel like Les Particules élémentaires can certainly contribute to an ongoing social discourse. The pity in L'Affaire Houellebecq is that the author's critics too often saddle him with the very cynicism he claims he wishes to combat.

Of all the commentators on L'Affaire, the novelist Dominique Noguez has been the most consistently sensible. In an essay that appeared in the review Atelier du Roman, Noguez dismisses the rather bizarre charge that Houellebecq has no style by pointing to the self-evident: “tout écrivain, même le plus exécrable, a un style—un style exécrable, justement” (17). He then goes on to discuss various stylistic strategies that appear in Houellebecq's writing, and compares them to those of other authors. In an essay written for Le Monde, “La Rage de ne pas lire,” Noguez takes his distance from arguments about Houellebecq's alleged place in a new literary “school,” and laments the low level of the critical discussions surrounding L'Affaire. He seems especially saddened by the vitriol emanating from Perpendiculaire, since he believes that the founders of this review

étaient partis d'un bon pas: créant avec leurs propres forces une revue originale, animant la vie littéraire parisienne avec leurs mercredis du café Les Marronniers, se donnant à l'occasion avec humour, publiant quelques bons livres, découvrant de nouveaux talents, assurant enfin à Michel Houellebecq qu'ils ont salué parmi les premiers, une reconnaissance méritée.

(1)

Noguez's reference to the accomplishments of Perpendiculaire raises an interesting side issue. Traditionally literary reviews have been places where new writers could find outlets for their work, and where editors might discover their authors of the future. This is no longer the case in France. The importance of literary reviews has been consistently declining. The most striking illustration of this phenomenon is that the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française has radically altered its publication schedule by switching from a monthly to a quarterly format (Savigneau 8). In a similar vein editors say that they rarely visit the literary reviews in search of new talent. Given this situation, one of the possibly unintended offshoots of L'Affaire, which pitted a relatively new review, Perpendiculaire, first against a former collaborator, and then against another new review, Ligne de Risque, was to revive interest, for however brief a time, in literary journals.

Given the declining importance of the literary review, two publishing houses have developed new strategies for showcasing young talent. Grasset subsidizes the popular magazine, Inrockuptibles, and once every few years, it publishes in book form excerpts from relatively unknown writers, not all of whom publish chez Grasset. This year Inrockuptibles Onze contains selections from eleven authors (thus the title). Except for Martin Winckler, the author of last year's La Maladie de Sachs, the writers in the current collection are largely unknown, but Grasset's initiative harbingers well for the future; in the previous volume appeared then little-known novelists such as Marie Darrieussecq and Michel Houellebecq.

Les Editions Robert Laffont is probably the most commercially savvy publishing house in France. It therefore comes as no surprise that its collection of short pieces would stay closer to home. Every year Laffont brings out a volume of stories by members of its Ecole de Brive. Each collection is centered on a theme, and this year's focus was on fleeting childhood memories which nevertheless constitute L'Or du temps.

This year les Editions Balland launched a collection of a different sort. Initially called “Le Rayon Gay,” the purpose was to provide a forum for fiction concentrating on homosexuality. However, it soon became apparent to the series's editor, Guillaume Dustan, that such a perspective was too narrow, and so he broadened the focus to include the writings of and about all marginalized people. In so doing, he renamed the collection, “Rayon.” Under this rubric Balland published Dustan's own, Nicholas Pages, the story of his relationship with a fellow gay writer. This novel provides valuable insights into the business side of literature, the literary forums, the jockeying for prestige and even understanding that are the daily fare of any professional writer. Nicholas Pages's Je mange un œuf also appears in “Le Rayon,” and it is an account of the novelist's daily activities where practically every morning starts with a slight variation on “je me réveille, je reste au lit, je bois un café sur le balcon” (9). A less successful novel in this collection is Frédéric Huet's Papa a tort, which is a fauxnaïf version of a young boy's slow awakening to his own homosexuality.

While Balland's venture is certainly idealistic, it may prove of dubious value. There already exist, and have existed for some time, numerous venues for works dealing with homosexuality. Every year appear novels by homosexuals addressing questions of sexual identity; it is doubtful today that a text of literary value would be refused simply because of its subject matter. Jean-François Kervéan's Vingt Fois toi et moi is typical of many recent explorations of the theme. In this novel the characters' gayness is a given; the social impact of AIDS is explored: “Vous croyez que le triangle rose et le sida ça vaut l'étoile jaune?” (136), and the real issue is the difficulty of forging lasting relationships. Balland is trying to move marginalized groups out of the ghetto, but the publishing house might have inadvertently only created a gilded one.

Kervéan's characters live with their sexuality; they are not obsessed by it. Such cannot be said for Morgan Sportès's heterosexual extravaganza, Rue du Japon, Paris. This novel details vividly an affair between a middle-aged writer and a young Japanese woman. Nothing is left to the imagination, and no fantasy remains unexplored. There are numerous allusions to Les Liaisons dangereuses, a work that still remains more erotic than Rue du Japon, Paris for no better reason than that the former leaves something to the imagination. Nevertheless, Rue du Japon remains a fascinating novel, not so much for the descriptive sexuality, nor for the main character's alleged aesthetic dilemma which a friend cruelly yet accurately pinpoints: “Mais tu veux quoi, au bout du compte? Ton roman ou ta Jap?” (358). Lovers of Paris will be thrilled by Sportès's ability to evoke the hidden byways and charms of the eleventh, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements.

In Rue du Japon the Japanese woman was obviously the foreigner. Amélie Nothomb reverses this situation in Stupeur et tremblements which describes a Belgian woman's year of working for a Japanese firm in Japan. This funny novel will do little for international understanding, as it consistently sends up Nipponese social and business practices, while describing the Japanese as work-driven robots with occasional attacks of humanity. The title refers to the emotional state that is supposed to accompany a commoner when meeting the emperor. It might also, however, summarize a reader's reaction to this book.

Nothomb's Japan is a distant country, but it is hardly exotic. Readers interested in the exploration of mysterious places would be better advised to turn to either Christian Liger's La Nuit de Faraman or Louis Gardel's Grand Seigneur, which, however distant their settings are from one another, share a common tone of melancholy and renunciation. La Nuit de Faraman is a beautifully written novel set in Faraman, a fictional city in France whose prosperity and surface happiness hide the secret of a terrible crime, the murder, for no rational reason, of Italian laborers working there one hundred years ago. The narrative slowly unearths the diabolic tendencies that lurk just below civilization's surface, tendencies that can burst forth in a moment of communal madness and then disappear until a young man, who might be Satan himself, comes to town.

The exoticism of the world of Louis Gardel's Grand Seigneur is more immediately apparent than that of the placid community of Faraman. The novel concerns Soliman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. It explores the final years of the most powerful man in the East whose sense of responsibility compels him to destroy or distance himself from those he loves. This is a story of a man imprisoned by power, forced to behave in cruel and dishonest ways in the interest of statecraft. The one enemy he cannot overcome is death itself, but by the novel's end, this adversary has become his only friend: “Renoncer est le plus beau mot du monde” (142).

Soliman's problems were immediate, practical, and political. His conscience was a nagging annoyance that he had little time to examine. The modern world is often quite different, a place where the psyche and its sundry insecurities seem to rule supreme. Simon, the main character in Leslie Kaplan's Le Psychanalyste, is something of a ruler in this realm. He is a psychiatrist, seemingly a Lacanian, since “Oui” is his most frequent response to anything his patients say. This is a long (457 pages) novel that follows Simon through weeks of his practice. Among the people he meets is “Miss Nobody Knows,” who was the main character in one of Kaplan's earlier novels. The story follows the pattern of Simon's treatments: stories succeed stories, and nothing is resolved at the end.

François, the main character in Jacques-Pierre Amette's L'Homme du silence, could have been one of Simon's patients. A member of the generation of '68, and a relatively successful radio commentator at the ORTF, his girlfriend's departure precipitates a crisis. He loses interest in his job, and eventually loses his job, but this apparent catastrophe leaves him unfazed. Like Liger and Gardel, Amette displays a talent for depicting melancholy. François's story is that of a life unlived, of a generation that failed to achieve its goals, if ever it knew what they were. François just floats through existence like the water which is the central image in the novel.

Whatever one makes of Simon's efforts to help his patients in Le Psychanalyste, he was attempting to apply new methods of treatment to old problems. A brighter version of this effort can be found in three novels engaged in literary experimentation. François Bott's Les Etés de la vie is really not one novel. It is, as the subtitle indicates, “cinquante-six esquisses pour un roman d'une saison.” The “saison” in question is not entirely a literary one. It is the author's life, whose stages he recounts through memories of summers near and distant. Bott has his thoughts on aging and dying, but irony, rather than melancholy is his strength. In what appears to be a sly reference to Les Particules élémentaires, he notes: “L'homme était ‘une passion inutile,’ mais il avait bien le droit de flirter” (60).

Oliver Rolin's Méroé juxtaposes a story centering on the life and death of the British General Gordon, killed at Khartoum, with reflections on the role of literature in the modern world. Gordon is isolated and out of place in the Sudan; it is only through a combination of Bible reading and brandy drinking that he maintains a fragile stability while awaiting the inevitable. Rolin seems to find in this “sorte de Lawrence du siècle passé, Don Quichotte christique” (11), a hero at once tragic and comic, because he believed so desperately that force could impose order on existence. In a novel replete with literary allusions, the author appears to suggest that language alone can create the semblance of an enduring order (128), and that the only place where humanity is really the center of the universe is in the realm of art (71).

Bott and Rolin's experiments with literary form are modest in themselves, but they become even more so when compared to Antoine Volodine's Des Anges mineurs. Over the last few years Volodine has introduced a plethora of new literary terms, all of which he uses to give voice to “des texts post-exotiques.” The postexotic universe is the world after some catastrophic event that has placed humanity in a position where it must start over again. The form best suited to depict this situation is le narrat: “j'appelle narrats des instantanés romanesques qui fixent une situation, des émotions, un conflit vibrant entre mémoire et réalité, entre imaginaire et souvenir” (7). Told in forty-nine short chapters, each of which has the name of a person in the title, Des Anges mineurs represents Will Scheidmann's efforts to supply a narrat for his forty-nine minor angels.

By the time the June issue of Atelier du Roman which contained a series of essays on Les Particules élémentaires appeared, L'Affaire Houellebecq was pretty much spent. Summer had arrived, and besides vacations those interested in literary matters were more concerned with preparing for la rentrée littéraire. The essays in Atelier du Roman reflect this change in sensibility. They are intelligent and insightful, but also a bit incredulous at the furor created around the novelist and his text. Clearly it was time to move on to other matters.

If L'Affaire Houellebecq contains more than a passing interest, it may be due to factors not entirely related to the author and his novel. The reaction to both may well reflect a fin du siècle anxiety, a perceived absence of and desire for a major French novelist, and a nostalgia for an earlier era where France's cultural dominance remained largely unquestioned. Certainly if one grossly simplifies the thematic concerns of Les Particules élémentaires, the result would be an ideal end-of-the-century fiction: the last hundred years, especially the latter fifty, witnessed the collapse of traditional moral, social, and aesthetic norms, and the next century promises to be safe only for emotional zombies. This has the aura of a big millennial message, the literary equivalent of the Y2K nervousness, since it is at once global and despairing. As such it could well appeal to those who never bothered to read the book, but still managed to take offense at its putative content.

It is common today to hear complaints that France has no novelist of the stature of a Proust, Céline, or Gide. That may well be true, but it is something of a worldwide phenomenon as witnessed by the Nobel Prize Committee's need in recent years to mine retirement communities to find an author on whom they can bestow a “lifetime achievement” award. The fact is that France has many fine writers, such as Jean Echenoz, Camille Laurens, Christian Oster, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, whose reputations are steadily growing, and others, such as Colette, Michel Tournier, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Marguerite Duras, and Patrick Modiano who have had a significant impact on twentieth-century literature. The idea that one has to manufacture a great new talent apparently just to round off the century, or that Houellebecq, the author of two novels, is the one, simply makes no sense.

The notion of somehow creating a “school” around Houellebecq and several other young writers is similarly overwrought. Schools tend to be invented by academics or publishers; in the former instance to provide neat classifications for literary history and clearer focuses for articles, and in the latter for marketing purposes. Schools do, however, confer a certain prestige. The “école de Minuit” (which was not Minuit's invention) excited great interest in the universities and the press, and briefly made the French novel the most prominent in Europe. In this respect Frédéric Badré's decision to call Houellebecq a “post-naturaliste” might also reflect a hankering after an intellectual dominance that France no longer possesses, but arguably did have in the latter portion of the nineteenth century. Nevetheless, linking Houellebecq with Zola as a novelist is as limiting and misleading as suggesting, as has been done, that Céline and Houellebecq share significantly similar social views. Such comparisons tell little about Houellebecq's fiction, or the paths of development it may take, and nothing about his politics.

And finally, what about the novel called Les Particules élémentaires? Anyone interested in contemporary fiction will want to read it; not because of the controversy surrounding and enriching the best-selling author, but because it is a subtle, many-layered text that confronts many of the social issues affecting France in the last fifty years. The characters, by their thoughts and acts, take positions concerning the Generation of '68, the New Age Sensibility, the potential and dangers of contemporary scientific discoveries, and the changing moral standards in the contemporary world. Ultimately the novel poses the question of how or if literature will be able to reflect and evaluate all this. Les Particules élémentaires marks a major advance over Houellebecq's first one; whatever his personal views on a variety of issues, as a novelist he displays a talent that continues to grow from one book to another. He is an author who at this juncture does not need to be decried or proclaimed. Rather, Michel Houellebecq is a writer to be watched.

Notes

1. For those unfamiliar with the storyline of Les Particules élémentaires, Michel and Boris are two half-brothers whose mother's interest in every new trend in life-styles has exposed them to many of the twentieth century's fads. As adults they move in very different directions. Boris seizes upon the sexual liberation of May '68, and passes from one woman and one New Age movement to another. He eventually becomes physically and emotionally exhausted and winds up in an institution. Michel is the opposite. A scientist and intellectual he has almost no affect. At the novel's end he has left France for Ireland where he clones human beings deprived of emotion.

2. I would like to thank Professors Véronique Anover, Ilse Krumschmidt, and Manuela Malakooti for their help in preparing this essay.

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