Les particules elementaire--Atomised

Atomised by Michel Houellebecq

I have often wondered how the children of the Flower Power generation
would be portrayed in literature when there were enough of them around
to form an identifiable social stratum. We are now coming to know the
answer, and it is not a pretty sight. The very unflattering portrayals
of aging hippie parents, and more importantly the effect of their
lifestyle on their children, in such recent fiction as Tom Wolfe's "A
Man in Full" and Salmon Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" are a
beginning, but they pale in comparison to what we find in Michel
Houellebecq's novel "Atomised."

Entitled "Les Particules elementaires" in the original French,
"Atomised" tells the story of two half brothers, Michel and Bruno, who
share the same mother, a "free-spirited" quasi-hippie gone upscale-New
Age with all of the pathetic irresponsibility that can entail. She
plays an important role in the story largely by being absent from most
of it. She is serially monogamous in terms of men and philosophies,
both of which are for her little more than fashion statements. There is
no place in her world for socialization and family cohesion. Michel and
Bruno do not, however, grow up in financial poverty. Their fathers
provide for them rather well. Yet they do grow up atomised, separated,
fragmented, like the society they form. By virtue of this proxy,
Houellebecq portrays modern Western society as a "motherless child,"
orphaned not by war or accident but rather by what he sees as laziness,
stupidity, and just one trendy philosophy too many. This is no
simplistic story of angst, alienation, and rebellion. It is far more
interesting than that. It is far funnier than that. You might well find
yourself, or certainly someone you know, in this book.

Michel is the quiet intellectual son, later becoming a molecular
biologist of considerable repute. Michel has a girlfriend as a young
man, the best catch in the sea so to speak, but for the most slender of
reasons, they lose contact, only reunite two decades later. She is
divorced by then, and childless. He is a scientist and academic. He
never married. They marry. She dies from disease, still childless.
Michel gives up on the notion of a female companion and fatherhood and
devotes himself to his work. More about the work later.

Bruno suffers extreme bullying in boarding school and becomes a
sex-obsessed schoolteacher, almost completely unsuccessful in putting
his obsession into action. Bruno is unable to form any relationships
with women, other than brief encounters with prostitutes, pornographic
images, and the occasional wacko. In middle age he goes to a New
Age-style retreat in the south of France in the hopes of finding sex.
He finally meets a compatible woman there. They attend swinger
(exchangiste) clubs together and plan to marry. There's someone for
everyone after all, it seems. Before they marry, she develops a
crippling disease and becomes wheelchair-ridden. Bruno doesn't offer to
stay around for this, and she doesn't ask. She dies. Bruno retires from
teaching and permanently checks himself into a mental institution. He
has found a family at last.

In short, Houellebecq's world is profoundly unhappy and unable to
perpetuate itself in the usual way.

The final chapter of the book lays out Houellebecq's solution for this
malaise. Michel develops a revolutionary principle of molecular biology
which paves the way for the genetic engineering of a "replacement" for
the existing human race. By replacing humanity with a copy derived from
a common gene pool, he envisions a utopian world in which everyone is
literally linked genetically, ensuring a workable collective conscious
and the final end to alienation, violence, and all the soul-murdering
ills of modern society. And by "replacement" I do not mean
"substitute." This is not genocide. All the world's races and ethnicity
remain. It is a kind of slowly waving magic wand concept, if you will.
The book ends many years into the future. Only a few descendants of the
original non-engineered humans remain. They will soon die out. All is
well, we are told, just one big happy family, more or less.

"Atomised" is well within certain Western cultural traditions, such as
self-consciousness (naval-gazing), primitivism, and utopianism. In
fact, Houellebecq takes these notions to the ultimate extreme. He
suggests a utopian solution of such extreme primitivism that the human
race we have now ceases to exist. The situation is so dire, he tells
us, that we can only escape it by replacing every person on earth with
a new and improved model. This is primitivism at the molecular level,
carried out on a truly Biblical scale. Houellebecq, however, is far
from the first writer to suggest something along these lines. William
S. Burroughs covered similar territory in "The Western Lands," though
his solution had to do with creating new life forms capable of
surviving in space, and then simply abandoning the doomed planet Earth
and colonizing somewhere else.

My own suggestion, however, is to focus on the story and not to take
this quasi-scientific stuff too seriously.

"Atomised" is a fun read. It is a page-turner, a dark comedy, and a
romp. I liked it. This is not some depressively serious sociological
vivisection. In fact, the style comes across as very light hearted most
of the time, even though we may grimace at the substance of the action.
I found the characters believable. They are at the same time on the
fringes of society and at its heart. The word center does not apply, as
there is no center to this society. We could almost ignore the fringes,
were it not for the fact that in this world the fringe is also at the
heart, and this heart has some serious problems.

"Atomised" also has a pronounced American feel to it. The subject
matter, the pacing, the dialog, all come across as American, or at the
very least as a kind of "international Mid-Atlantic." In fact, the
author could easily just change some of the names, make the location
California instead of France, and no one would know the difference. The
translation, though, is British. Fair enough, as the translation is for
a British audience, but the use of British slang in a work that is so
patently American in practically every other way will come across as
somewhat jarring to any reader who knows the difference. A minor point,
perhaps, but I thought the translation did a bit of a disservice to the
book in this respect.

"Atomised," and to a much greater extent his newest book "Platforme"
(not yet available in English), have given rise to heated discussions
in France, though I think it might be more accurate to say his writing
has given rise to a lot of hot air. Houellebecq comes across as an
accomplished wind-up artist who deliberately sets out to create
controversy. He knows which buttons to push to create the largest ink
storm. What I find endlessly amusing about this kind of faux
controversy is that interviewers invariably snap up the bait like a
school of Pavlovian carp. In this respect, Houellebecq is following a
well-trod path. Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Ellroy, and perhaps
most famously, Oscar Wilde, made entire careers out of relentless
self-promotion and stylised controversy. Of course, unless there is
talent to back it up, this trick only works once. Houellebecq
definitely has the talent. He is an accomplished author of considerable
promise.

I say read the book. Enjoy its freshness and fluidity. Laugh at the
humor. And here's hoping this guy keeps writing for a long time to
come.