The Great Emetic Novel

...The Stalinist is also a philosophe...

...The last "made a remarkable debut when, in 1991, during a long initiation in a sweat lodge fired by sacred coals, an initiate died of heart failure...

...they tend to die young...

...This is what became of the generation of '68...

...Although Michel, who grows up to be a famed molecular biologist, gives the book its title, it is Bruno, a sexual predator, whose sufferings are seen up close...

...he cannot respond to her, and she seeks consolation in marriages, orgies and "liaisons dangereux...

...They drink cheap booze and fall asleep, their breath stinks, then they wake up and start all over again...

...The high points of his existence are the nights spent with Christiane, cruising the échangiste clubs of Paris, where anything goes with anyone who will go with you...

...Rather, Houellebecq takes aim at the entire late 20th-century culture of self-fulfillment and works his way—claws and scratches his way, really—into the entrails of every cow held sacred by the cultural Left, in particular the post-Esalen, pre-Prozac, feel-good Left...

...The Elementary Particles is nasty stuff indeed...

...Moral tracts can make insufferable novels...

...Annabelle will take her own life rather than die of cancer...

...every generation has been there, done that...

...The passionless Michel, meanwhile, cloisters himself in research, where he will eventually make breakthroughs in DNA as foundational as those of Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr in particle physics...

...Francesco di Meola, who had spirited Bruno and Michel's mother off to California, turns into a maker of snuff movies whose characters are tortured and killed...

...They meet again in their 40s for a wistful reunion, during which she becomes pregnant and aborts immediately when she is discovered to have uterine cancer...

...He himself is an indifferent father to a son who is being raised by his ex-wife while he is out being a pilgrim of pleasure...

...Insofar as his meandering tour of therapeutic fashion touches down on both sides of the Atlantic, there will be issues indeed to rile Americans, especially those who at one time or another took the supposed healing arts of the past 40 years as comprehensive guides to the perplexed...

...In one scene, a teenage Bruno enters his mother's bedroom one morning and kneels before her vagina...

...I would have found the book truer to its pornographic premises if Bruno had emerged strengthened from his afternoons of group sex on the beaches of Languedoc and his nights at the Paris clubs, but the author, in a choice between desire and nausea, finally opted for the latter...

...We should not, however, mistake Houellebecq's bitterness, which grinds whole movements under its heel, as anything akin to the family-values piety...

...But while the book develops into a gruesome comedy of sex and fashion, we are never allowed to forget that it is at bottom about parents who love recklessly, have children thoughtlessly, and trek off in search of orgasm and satori, leaving grandma up to her derrière in diapers and dishes...

...He succeeds, but not before being exposed to the fetishes of the leisure industry: walking on hot coals, transactional analysis, sex meditation, astrology, Egyptian tarot reading, chakra manipulation, crystal healing, Tantric Zen, sensitive Gestalt massage, rebirfhing in warm water, and Siberian shamanism...

...who died for his sins (he had refused to care for her after she was paralyzed), that thrust him over the edge...

...That Michel is largely offstage in The Elementary Particles is a blessing...

...The hero of the book is Bruno, whose personal journey to the end of night causes him to end his days sedated in a clinic...

...But what saves The Elementary Particles from being mere diatribe is its schadenfreude, the delight it takes in the monstrosity it scorns...

...Michel Houellebecq, however, has pulled out all the stops and come away, I believe, with a modest triumph in his effort to write the great emetic novel...

...Of course, even in France, you do not make a scandal by outing Descartes...

...As a character he is flatter than last week's soufflé, and we gather that he exists for his contribution to the novel's weird narrative device: It is being told retrospectively from about the year 2075 by one or more of the engineered creatures who have supplanted mankind as we know it and are, it seems, the products of Michel's research...

...Reviewed by Mark Shechner Professor of English, State University of New York, Buffalo Two years ago Michel Houellebecq, aseasonedprovocateur, became the scourge of French literary circles with the publication of his second novel, The Elementary Particles...

...they live a lot longer and suffer a lot more...

...French and American readers do not usually rise to the same bait, even when a literary Stalinist is chumming the waters...

...It is a novelized cousin of tabloid pornography in that regard, a cavalcade of genitals and squareups...

...After many lovers, she married Serge Clément, a medical intern about whom Bruno would later say, "You want to know what my dad was like...

...Once he finally meets an undeceived woman named Christiane, he learns the truth: that his despair is normal and that everyone in the place is filled with the same self-contempt...

...The Elementary Particles is a tale of two brothers, Bruno and Michel, who occupy opposing ends of the erotic spectrum—the stalker and the celibate, respectively...

...An unattractive boy, he is sent to a boarding school in Meaux where he is the "omega male" and is regularly beaten, pissed on, and sodomized...

...In France," Emily Eakin wrote this past September 10 in the New York Times Magazine, "Houellebecq is infamous for giving Michel, his biologist antihero, the same last name—Djerzinski—as a high-ranking Stalinist official and then defending the gesture by saying Stalin wasn't such a bad guy...

...Stalinism is only the tip of the Houellebecq iceberg...

...What are the chances of a similar succès de scandale in the United States...

...Leaving that baby, Michel, with Marc, Janine then takes up with Francesco di Meola, an Italian-American who boasts of big doings in California: Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley and the Esalen Institute...

...Women take tranquilizers, go to yoga classes, see a shrink...

...In the 1980s, as the culture of transcendence-lite takes hold, he camps out at Lieu de Changement, "a place where the principles of self-government, respect for individual freedom and true democracy could be practiced in the 'here and now.'" All Bruno really wants to do is satisfy his sexual desires here and now and spare himself 13-hour flights to Bangkok...

...These UNRAVELINGS are the opening credits of the novel, setting the stage for everything that follows...

...Beloved in his youth by the beautiful Annabelle (shades of Poe here...

...HOUELLEBECQ has a temperamental proclivity for bleakness...

...It is peppered with portentous references to continental philosophers— Kant, Comte, Nietzsche, Descartes, Marx, Pascal, Sartre, Gilles Deleuze...

...this is what comes of dancing with Sartre at the Tabou...

...After all, Houellebecq told a French magazine...

...But to say what these are, and to compose the machine, is ridiculous...

...Give a gorilla a mobile phone and you've got the general idea...

...In a landmark decision that affected the fate of literature back in 1933, John M. Woolsey, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York, declared that while "the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac...

...Janine then gets pregnant by a documentary filmmaker named Marc Djerzinski and sheds her husband as quickly as a cobra sheds a skin...

...Of Nabokov...

...then he goes out and crushes a cat's head with a rock...

...They share a mother, Janine, whose stunning Mediterranean beauty was her passport into la rive gauche, where she danced to bebop at the Tabou with Jean-Paul Sartre...

...Bruno, the broken child of the sexual revolution, refuses to give up the rebellious imperatives of the self that, in his mother, had brought such misery to his life...

...It is as if Houellebecq were giving us an updated version of a degeneracy myth: poor Bruno had masturbated once too often and blown his mind...

...The half-brothers, Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski, are gallery exhibits of what can happen when culture gets destabilized and individuals, cut loose from tradition, sign on to cults of experience and liberation...

...Well, no orgies for those dudes...

...I have often pondered the good judge's use of the word "emetic" in that decision, since I have never found Ulysses abook to induce vomiting...

...The book comes hailed as a pornotopia, yet frequently bogs down in such windy digressions as: "Remember Pascal: 'We must say summarily: This is made by figure and motion, for it is true...

...What American reader, not knowing Pascal from pasta, is going to rise up in horror at that sort of thing...

...But it is useless, uncertain, and painful.' Once again he's right and Descartes is wrong...

...From such experiences, Bruno will be marked with self-loathing: As a young man he becomes a virtuoso of humiliation, a lonely masturbator in search of orgo-redemption, which he finds in the bodies of prostitutes or young women as ungainly as himself-one of whom will throw herself out of a window after a meeting with him...

...Michel too will wind up with a grandmother, since Marc Djerzinski disappears on a filming trip to Tibet...

...Behind his diatribes against feminism, environmentalism, anarchism, Marxism, body worship, nature-worship, and New Age conversations with the Angel there smolders one raging question: Where were the mothers when their children cried...

...Stalin 'killed a lot of anarchists.' His antipathy for democracy ('Liberty is equivalent to suffering,' he said on French television) has caused much hand-wringing among the intelligentsia...

...In one of the most brutal scenes in a brutal book, the prefect finds him one night "curled up on the floor of the toilet in the courtyard, naked and covered in shit...

...It is in one of these, however, that his beloved Christiane collapses in pain while being taken from behind by a stranger...

...Christiane, Bruno's initiatrix into tenderness and partner in orgies, develops a spinal disorder and, paralyzed below the waist, throws herself down a stairwell...

...A modern couple, Serge and Janine find the birth of son Bruno in 1956 incompatible with their personal freedom and ship him off to his maternal grandmother in Algeria...

...Men who grow old alone have it easier than older women," Christiane tells him...

...Or perhaps it was the death of his beloved Christiane (what's in a name...

...And no readers either...