The Elementary Particles

The Elementary Particles 
(Les Particules élémentaires)
Michel Houellebecq

(click here for author website--in French)
Vintage International, 2001

First things first: if you are the type of person who believes that 'spoilers' are a thing, then save this review for after you've read this challenging novel.  For the record, I think anything that can truly be spoiled by a spoiler is not very valuable in the first place.

Now, with that piece of housekeeping out of the way, let's take a quick look at one of the most ambitious novels I've read in some time.  As will be seen with a quick look just about anywhere on the web, Houellebecq and his writing are also frequent subjects of controversy.  I am not well aware of contemporary trends or standards in French literature.  But I can easily compare him to some American authors to clarify the intensity or vulgarity (whichever you prefer) of his style, or at least the style in this book.  
The book deals in explicit sexual intercourse.  When coming from the narrator, the language used is detached and clinical if at the same time shockingly thorough.  The language of sex and sexuality, from the mouths of characters, follows the tendencies of those characters--crude, bashful, joyous, depressive, and so on.  In no way, however, does the book employ the kind of shock tactics often used by writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis.  Nor is the explicit language in service of any sort of decadent tendency.


In fact, those that would think so have clearly and simply failed to read (or understand) the framing elements of the novel--the 'Prologue and 'Epilogue.' These crucial parts of the novel reveal the story to as primarily a history and biography of the era just before the (fictional) obviation of sexual reproduction and the scientific visionary most responsible for said obviation.  This would be Michel Djerzinski, one of the novel's step-brother duo, both of whom live lives of amorous awkwardness and confusion, and have been scared by the 'free love' pretensions of their parents' generation.  

The narrator  begins the story explaining the rareness of 'metaphysical mutations'--think something like Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm shift, but with even more intensive and extensive effect.  It is Djerzinski who would be responsible for the final metaphysical mutations that would end millenia of human suffering through a combination of philosophical pleadings and scientific breakthroughs.


This is why I say the language cannot be considered shocking in any way.  Or, to put it another way, it is only as shocking as what it describes: a human race in a time and place of total desperation, an obsessive devotion to what the narrator terms 'the cult of the body beautiful' and the sexual gratification of this body.  It is Djerzinski who fights to end the cycle of decay and desperation by conclusively replacing it with reliable means of asexual reproduction.  The vulgarity of the characters is the vulgarity of their times; the vulgarity of the narrator is that of the scientist.


Hence why I was so impressed with the novel.  I experienced in it nothing less than a revival of the naturalist project--of both the American and the French variety.  A biting, sardonic reminder to all humanists of the seething, humming biological base on which the superstructures of their cultures and nobilities and progresses are constructed.


I strongly and seriously recommend anyone who wants to think freshly and honestly about  our contemporary period to sit still, be quiet, and have a good scuffle with this book.