SOURCE: Berman, Paul. “Depressive Lucidity.” New Republic 223, no. 21 (20 November 2000): 25-9.

In the following review, Berman explores Houellebecq's dark, unsavory cynicism and social criticism in The Elementary Particles, noting similarities with Honoré de Balzac's reactionary perspective.

The narrator of Michel Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, or Extension of the Field of Struggle, visits a shrink, who diagnoses him with a grim-sounding condition called “depressive lucidity.” In Houellebecq's second novel, The Elementary Particles—the book that has aroused all kinds of controversies in France in the last couple of years, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and is bound to arouse its share of American controversies, too—a main character likewise visits a shrink. The same diagnosis is proposed: “depressive lucidity.” There is a pattern here. Now that I have read three volumes of Houellebecq's poetry, too, plus a collection of essays and prose...