SOURCE: Shechner, Mark. “The Great Emetic Novel.” New Leader 83, no. 5 (November-December 2000): 50-1.

In the following review, Shechner contends that The Elementary Particles effectively scorns and satirizes, rather than merely moralizes, the nauseating depravity it describes.

Two years ago Michel Houellebecq, a seasoned provocateur, became the scourge of French literary circles with the publication of his second novel, The Elementary Particles. “In France,” Emily Eakin wrote this past September 10 in the New York Times Magazine, “Houellebecq is infamous for giving Michel, his biologist antihero, the same last name—Djerzinski—as a high-ranking Stalinist official and then defending the gesture by saying Stalin wasn't such a bad guy. After all, Houellebecq told a French magazine … Stalin ‘killed a lot of anarchists.’ His antipathy for democracy (‘Liberty is equivalent to suffering,’ he said on French television) has caused much hand-wringing among the intelligentsia.” What are the chances of a similar succ...