SOURCE: Cloonan, William. “Literary Scandal, Fin du Siècle, and the Novel in 1999.” French Review 74, no. 1 (October 2000): 14-30.

In the following essay, Cloonan examines the public controversy surrounding Les Particules élémentaires, Houellebecq's literary celebrity and artistic merit, and how “L'Affaire Houellebecq” sheds light on the state of French letters, culture, and intellectual debate at the end of the twentieth century.

In Paris this summer an editor at the Editions du Seuil complained that the rentrée of 1998 had been dominated, and to a degree spoiled by the attention given to one novel. She was referring, of course, to Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires, which was mentioned in last year's French Review essay. In the ensuing months a controversy emerged, provoked in large measure by Houellebecq's former collaborators at the review Perpendiculaire, that was rapidly christened l'Affaire Houellebecq. The very name given the scandal points to its...