SOURCE: Gardels, Nathan. “Cloning: Central Planning of the 21st Century?” NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly 18, no. 1 (winter 2001): 56.

In the following review, Gardels examines Houellebecq's depiction of global capitalism and social anomie as a precursor to genetic engineering in The Elementary Particles.

French novelist Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles is a book of brutal truths about the cultural upheaval that spread across Europe and America from the 1960s through the 1970s. Unlike memoirs of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China that focus on the horrors of the time, this novel is about the personal and social consequences decades later of what we might call the Great Western Cultural Revolution.

Through the lenses of his characters Bruno and Michel, half-brothers whose mother left them to live unencumbered in California, Houellebecq ponders how liberation, sexual and otherwise, smashed not only authority and a sense of responsibility, but love itself. In the...