When I was younger and going through some particularly unhappy break-up or other, I’d relieve my tumultuous feelings by rewatching The World At War on telly. Sometimes it feels good to have confirmation that things really are as bad as they seem. Michel Houellebecq’s breakthrough novel Atomised, published 25 years ago this week, has provided a similarly cathartic service for a generation of disaffected men.
Originally entitled Les Particules Élementaires, the book’s first appearance sent the French literary scene into a frenzy; selling thousands of copies, sparking many an op-ed, and causing the owner of a literary prize awarded to the book to withdraw his patronage. International publishers scented a transferable succès de scandale. The designer of the UK translation put a skeletal nymphet on the cover, insolently facing the camera dressed only in her knickers.
The implication to the reader was that he was purchasing a combination of hot sex and cool Gallic hipsterism in literary form. No greater joke has ever been played on the British novel-buying male. In fact, Atomised presents a sexual wasteland full of neurotics, narcissists, and malformed losers. And, much like its anorak-wearing author, no character in the book possesses any cool whatsoever.
Atomised is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. Michel is a robotic rationalist, constitutionally unable to form meaningful human relationships. In his professional life as a biologist, he searches for a way to eliminate the mess of concupiscence from the human condition. Bruno, on the other hand, is a monomaniacal sexual obsessive, restlessly questing through brothels, orgies and naturist colonies for a degree of satiation he never finds.
For Bruno, there are only two kinds of women: the enticing unavailable ones that make him feel inadequate and tormented; or the ones he can have, that make him feel bored and detached. For both brothers, moments of tender love and compassion from women are fleeting, and each is psychologically unfit to receive them. The immediate cause of all this is their monstrous hippy mother who — “believing that maternity was something every woman should experience” — decides to keep the accidental human by-products of her trysts, but leaves the nurture of them to inadequate others. The distal cause, meanwhile, is the fall of Western civilisation.
The book is replete with failed parenting relationships, failed marriages and failed erections. Humans are animals upon whom nature has played a cruel trick, bestowing them with socially malleable cravings that endlessly distress them and which capitalism exploits. Suffering is everywhere and, in the absence of the Judeo-Christian framework, has no meaning. Death is feared pathologically. Sexual promiscuity is the only permissible way left for males to engage in competition with peers, but the prizes are ultimately terrible. Pneumatic young women gain tenuous social capital from acting like sex objects. Ageing female bodies literally have no point anymore, and their owners know it.
Since the book’s publication in 1998, patterns of critical evaluation have had plenty of time to settle. And many of these have tended to treat it, along with the wider oeuvre within which it sits, as containing a serious political message, or as otherwise having something to teach readers.
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