Over the past few months since I've allowed myself (forced rather?) to take a few steps from my new found South American obsession (Llosa though, I will always love you), I've returned to my adopted roots: French disenchantment and immigrants. At first thought, the two concepts, if immigrants can be considered a concept, seem to sit at opposite ends of the spectrum; yet the two do have something in common: in the quest to feel rooted and connected to who we are and what we may become, la malaise francaise seeks to settle the uneasiness that we experience when we feel that we don't really belong. Michel Houellebecq must constantly be suffering from some form of malaise or another. While it is probably naive to consider an author to be exposing a piece of himself in his work, I can't help but feel Les Particules élémentaires is a sort of Houellebecqian manifesto. Two brothers with two different fathers have a mother who abandoned them for a hippie commune are basically disconnected from anything resembling of familiar roots. They do have one another though, which both derive a sort of comfort from or at least familiarity and commonality (matriarchal abandonment). This device serves as Houellebecq's narrative as the brothers recall their lives to one another and to the few women who play any kind of roles in their lives. It is so very French. Most of the story unfolds over long dinners and many bottles of wine. I felt almost drunk from reading the prose at times. Their stories are not particularly happy ones either -- one brother was subjected to repeated physical and sexual abuse in the different private boarding schools he attended and the other, more shy and sensitive, is turned when his girlfriend sleeps with the hippie commune leader's deranged son posing as a bass guitarist.
What makes Les Particules interesting, however, is not how the brothers both deal with their own sexual perversion but how this perversion becomes the roots of their quest for meaning and truth in their own lives. Houellebecq's thesis seems to attest that no human connection is real; rather, it serves only as a mechanism to the next stages in life. In one instance, a brother goes slowly insane while the other becomes increasingly certain that the relationship between man and woman as a reproductive one is so unnecessary that he devotes his life to achieving an asexual means of reproduction through cloning. The few women who play any pivotal role in the novel (besides their mother whom they eventually see on her death bed and then spit on her grave) both die horrific and painful deaths. One eventually commits suicide after becoming paralyzed in a sex club while the other, so hopeful to have a child, becomes pregnant only to learn she has ovarian cancer, eventually slipping into a morphine induced coma. What this says about the state of man: I don't know. I hope it is just a dramatization of malaise because it certainly isn't hopeful but it certainly makes you wonder, what are our expectations in life really built upon?
And yet, these expectations, seem to be increasingly stifled when you leave the old country for a new one. What should be some great opportunity of shiny newness-- trading sand for pavement, tents for brick walls, is merely an imaginative and naive way to lay a clean rug onto of a tattered one and call it a new floor. In Zadie Smith's White Teeth (white teeth perhaps being the only way we can claim sameness in a room full of different colored skins), it's the roots that seem to be rotting away after being infected by a more powerful weed. Yet, even Smith isn't so much preoccupied with the truth of the roots (made clear when one son is sent back to Bangladesh only to return more English than if he had stayed in East London) but once again, it is the perversion of humanity. An entire history of two families is destroyed by a rat who is supposed to live forever, or at least, live for as long as he has been engineered to survive as prescribed by science and the powers of gene-therapy.
So is it malaise or a preoccupation of new truths? Truth, I suppose, can only be relative even when challenged by science.
