Michel Houellebecq's jeremiad of a novel, the notorious near winner of this year's Prix de Goncourt, is the story of two half-brothers, children of the '60s, permanently screwed up by their parents' quest for self-fulfillment -- and by teen magazines, globalization, miniskirts, the Rolling Stones, the human potential movement, the cult of the body beautiful, New Age communes-turned-corporations, African dance classes, no-fault divorce, holistic medicine and every other artifact of the Generation Moi that Houellebecq manages to squeeze under his burning satirical lens.

Abandoned as a baby by his communard mother and Buddhist father, Michel grows up asexual, introverted and intellectually precocious. After the end of his one (platonic, teenage) romance and the death of the grandmother who raised him, Michel devotes the rest of his life (when he isn't debilitatingly depressed) to theoretical biophysics -- ultimately, to developing a race of clones, free of human misery and desire, who will render mankind obsolete and take over the world.

Bruno, Michel's half-brother, has an even lonelier childhood, spent largely at a "progressive" boarding school (where he is literally made to eat shit) and permissive hippie campsites, where his mother hopes he'll get over his "hangups about sex." Easier said than done for Bruno, who learns early that the sexual revolution is in fact a war of all against all -- and that he is bound to be one of the majority, i.e. the losers. Fat, balding, charmless, bitter and desperate for love, he grows up unable to attract anyone less obviously pathetic than he is. Quietly fired from his job as a schoolteacher for exposing himself to a student (she bursts out laughing); divorced from a wife (and son) he despises; addicted to sex clubs, whores and bourbon, Bruno works as a civil servant by day and by night vents his bile in reactionary, mostly unpublished articles and poems on "the suicide of the West." What brings these stunted lives to crisis, and finally to grief, is the inability of either man to love when love is finally offered to him -- an inability that Houellebecq traces, with parodic pseudoscientism ("A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975"), to postwar cultural and economic trends.

French and British critics have compared Houellebecq to Balzac, i.e. they have no idea what to make of him; it shows, in part, how badly our own best recent fiction has exported. American readers, accustomed to radical realism on a big scale, may be less impressed by the size of Houellebecq's canvas than by the small, sad details that animate it. "The Elementary Particles" is grotesque and fantastical, full of loony physics, half-baked history and sociobiology, bad verse and sputtering misanthropy. It is also very funny, and sharply observed; but what makes it great satire, I think, is its childlike capacity for disappointment. Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn't, his compassion can blow you away.

-- Lorin Stein

Loving Graham Greene
By Gloria Emerson
Random House, 176 pages

Molly Benson, the protagonist in veteran foreign correspondent Gloria Emerson's first novel, is a well-meaning, dotty, liberal heiress who lives in genteel squalor in tony Princeton, N.J. Molly spends her inheritance on a small foundation, through which she travels to third world countries to help worthy individuals. She's driven by a desire to live out the ideals of her hero, novelist Graham Greene, with whom she carried on a polite correspondence following a single meeting, as well as to honor her brother, a foreign correspondent who was killed in Central America.

Upon Greene's death, the doubly bereaved Molly decides to travel to war-torn Algeria. Her plan is to find persecuted writers and arrange for bodyguards for them, and off she goes, accompanied by her best friend, Bertie, and Toby, a fleshy, voluble, ineffectual British graduate student. (The two women think bringing a man along would be a good idea, and Toby is the best they can come up with.) Needless to say, once they arrive things go haywire almost immediately. They have overestimated the likelihood of two inexperienced Western women accomplishing anything in an Arab country and underestimated the seriousness of the civil war, which places them in grave danger and renders utterly laughable Molly and Bertie's desire to make a dent in the suffering around them.

If all this sounds too heavy, rest assured that the vessel for these serious themes is a charming one. Emerson -- whose "Winners & Losers," a nonfiction book about the Vietnam War and its effect on Americans, won a National Book Award in 1978 -- has a light touch. The novel's warmhearted, forgiving quality softens the harsh light it shines on the dangerous naiveté of the self-serving Molly and her cohorts. It's funny, too, full of arch satire of do-gooders and do-nothings alike. In its grasp of the places where world politics and drawing-room politics meet and the folly of individual Americans who try to enact their political and humanitarian ideals overseas, "Loving Graham Greene" is like a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn.

-- Maria Russo

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"