In the summer of 1998, the world got a glimpse of what many took to be the new France in the victorious, rnultiethnic World Cup soccer team. Prime Minister Jospin noted how well this team symbolized "the unity and diversity of France." In the parade that followed crowds cheered their French team, with its black, beur, Kabyle, and Slav heroes. So for a moment France seemed at peace with itself, the extreme Right embarrassed, and American exporters of multiculturalism vindicated. The euphoria, however, was not to last, and, a few weeks later, a book appeared that signaled a new turn in the French culture wars, Michel Houellebecq's brilliant Les Particules élémentaires (Flammarion 1998). France was overtaken by this novel, it was not so much published, one critic wrote, as "detonated," and the book soon went from phenomenon to controversy to, inevitably, affaire. Houellebecq's book attacks the materialistic, liberal, and Americanized France bequeathed to his generation by its confused elders, and it is this thesis that has provoked controversy. It is polemical without being political, and, like writers of the interwar "non-conformist" generation, Houellebecq appropriates the language of the Left for what many see as a right-wing attack. This debate over whether the book is Right, Left, or neither has precccupied the French press, but what many critics have missed is how anti-Americanism provides the glue that gives his thesis cohesion. In this way too, Houellebecq's book is strikingly reminiscent of the nonconformist generation (1)

A year has passed without much letup in the argument. The book itself, which sold an exceptional quarter million copies in its first three months, has been understood as a tremendous achievement. Editorials in both Le Monde and Le Figaro credit it with reinvigorating French letters, even as the surrounding controversy, aided by the 'author's deft manipulation, has blossomed into a less promising sign of the nation's political exhaustion. Houellebecq appeared on Bernard Pivot's Bouillon de Culture, won the Prix Novembre and Meilleur Livre de 1998 by Lire, and has been the subject of hundreds of articles, interviews, attacks, and features (2). Knopf bought the translation rights and a film of the novel is underway

Les Particules élémentaires follows the growth and development of two halfbrothers, Michel and Bruno-the first an asexual scientist, the second a troubled hedonist - as they negotiate the empry and depressing terrain of post-1968 France. Their lives, it seems, have been predestined for trouble by their careless, carefree, soon-to-be hippie mother. They are fathered by different men and raised apart (in the care of grandparents) and take two paths to misery. Bruno, a literature teacher and budding writer, obsessed with sex and increasingly alienated and racist, and Michel, a geneticist, disdainful of eros and humanity, who stumbles upon a way to save mankind from future turmoil. Their story is told, piece by piece, against the background of a land that resembles less the restrained, magical France of their youth ("where even the cowboys and Indians were French" [p. 46]) and more America. Bruno, after failing in career, love, and marriage, sinks deeply into the pursuit of insatiable sexuality, from Minitel Rose to swingers' clubs, and the countless graphic descriptions of "modern" sex (many quite humorous) have added to the book's notoriety. His inability to achieve happiness leads him to ever greater extremes - prostitutes, group sex, plastic surgery, and pursuit of his adolescent students.

Michel, on the other hand, abstains completely, and buries himself in hyperrationalist science. The chapters devoted to Michel are far less compelling, until the end, when we understand that his research has as its ultimate goal the creation of an asexual, cloned, new man - and it will be realized twenty years after the character's suicide. Michel has, in effect, understood what Bruno lived - that endless individual freedom and sexuality has destroyed man and required him to recreate civilization. The tension between Bruno and Michel, two products of the grotesque modern world, causes the novel to waver intriguingly between pornography and science fiction. As the title suggests, the scientific notion of elementary particles (deracinated, free-floating) describes what becomes of humans when liberalism, new-age philosophy, women's liberation, individualism, and, of course, Americanism are allowed free rein. Technologized, materialized, dehumanized, multicultural France has caused confusion in the likes of Michel and Bruno, Houellebecq argues, and has left them as "elementary particles" in their society -rootless, alienated, and capable of only senseless hedonism or suicide.

The novel is grand, complexe and knowing, but also acidly bitter, and much of the exchange has been regarding whom, precisely, Houellebecq is targeting. He certainly blames the soixante-huitards for the collapse of French civilization, yet his ultimate enemy is more obscure. While the novel's theme is an antiliberal one, mere reaction seems to provide him no comfort. In this way, he compellingly echoes Georges Bernanos, Emmanuel Mounier, Robert Aron, and an old tradition of French self-critique that demanded a spiritual revival, and that found no friends on the right or left (3). Just like these "spiritualists" of the interwar era, Houellebecq places the blame on America - even allows anti-Americanism to substitute for an ideology. The French Left, he implies, for all its humanitarian pretensions, allowed American style and hip diversity to submerge French society and with it, universalise Republican values, while the French Right has been too blinded by liberal economics and materialism to offer any alternative.

The sensation the novel provoked began even before publication, with an odd lawsuit brought by the new-age camp called "L'Espace du Possible." The owners, displeased that Houellebecq used their name to describe the locale of Bruno's life-changing sexual apotheosis, tried to block publication of the book. In later editions the camp was renamed "Le Lieu du Changement" to prevent legal action. And then there was the public attack on Houellebecq from the literary journal Perpendiculaire, of which he was a founding member. Perpendiculaire, also published by Flammarion, expelled him for what appeared to be political crimes contained in his novel - a subject gleefully picked up by Le Figaro which devoted four articles on one page to the "witch hunt" that Houellebecq was undergoing (4). Perpendiculaire used harsh language in its critique ("Lepénisation des esprits"). Houellebecq himself, offended by this betrayal and anxious to exploit it, was then put "on trial" by his erstwhile colleagues. Perpendiculaire was given a page in Le Monde to explain itself, and the équipe, modestly, tried, although the charges of "show trial" stuck. It was not only the Right that was disturbed by this - Dominique Noguez, writing in Le Monde, pointed out its absurdity, noting that Houellebecq had published equally controversial passages in Perpendiculaire itself (5). Houellebecq attacked them for their behavior and, rather than seeking reconciliation, said he "hoped for their collapse" (6). The charges brought against him, reaction and misogyny, among others, were, in Houellebecq's perspective, essentially "American," as they reflect the American concern with political conformity. The condemnation by Perpendiculaire also underlines similarities with Bernanos, whose flirtations with politics alienated him from his old friends without making new ones, and assured his status as poète maudit. It also shows the author's tendency to invoke America as the negative model. To clarify this strategy, we can look closely at how America and American values insert themselves at crucial points in his book.

Houellebecq does not exactly romanticize the French past, but he certainly contrasts the despiritualized France of today with an earlier ideal. His anger at France seems so thorough that it is hard to follow the anti-Americanism that propels it - but it appears at every major juncture in the book, and like the inter-war spiritualists, he hates France primarily for having become Americanized. From the first moments in the story, Bruno and Michel's lives are disturbed by the American Menace. Their mother, a beautiful, free-spirited woman rejected the stodgy Algiers of her youth, and embraced the "culture of sexual consomption" that was just beginning to make its way over from the United States (p. 35). She soon deserts her children to join a California commune, where she becomes an early follower of Esalen and an advocate of sexual freedom. Bruno and Michel, although abandoned, seem to have a chance at happiness, but the further intrusions of America destroy that chance. Both fall victim to Americanized notions of sexuality, and this becomes the central theme of the book. The relative pleasure of the boys' youth comes to a sudden end around 1970, as they enter adolescence and the old France begins to die. Houellebecq cites many examples: sex shops, hippies, rock music, teen magazines, the musical "Hair," but all of them come from across the Atlantic (pp. 70-71). So Bruno and Michel enter adolescence in the midst of this unfinished revolution regarding sexual matters. The girls they grow up with pick and choose between the values of American materialism (exemplified for Houellebecq by 20 Ans magazine) and American free love, and this leads to confusion and dissatisfaction. Their mother, as if an emissary from a noxious America, appears now and then, pushing hippie sexual openness on an embarrassed Bruno - he later recounts to a psychoanalyst how he would branler as he watched her entertaining lovers - noting his pathetic, flabbiness in contrast to their tanned, body-cult beauty - another American export. Michel's girlfriend is then stolen from him by the son of one of his mother's lovers - an American "rock star" (P. 107). From those two traumas, traceable to both their mother and America, Houellebecq's heroes do not seem to recover. The subjects of their first love, like most women in the book, die tragically.

In their schooling these problems continue - the "American style" university (Paris XI) leaves Michel unhappy, just as American educational reforms led to the further humiliation of Bruno. Years later, we rejoin Bruno, addicted to cheeseburgers, milk shakes, North African fast food, and pornography. After a brief flirtation with Christianity (he immerses himself in Péguy, to no avail) he moves from pornography to participation. He becomes aware of his own physical insufficiency (a new concem that, Bruno asserts, women didn't care about until they were convinced to by American homosexuels) but no matter - plastic surgery can change that. But even in the midst of sexual orgies he senses the specter of America. The women he sleeps with are not so much experiencing the act as they are imitating the movements, gestures, and expressions of American porn actresses.

While Michel retreats into the world of Anglo-American positivisme Bruno sinks deeper into his own depression. Teaching at a multiethnic lycée, he blames a conspiracy of American capitalism to promote black culture for his students' lack of interest. He momentarily abandons teaching to become a racist polemicist, before suffering a mental breakdown. When their mother reappears, she is dying in the south of France. Having indulged in every trendy fad, she has now converted to Islam, a fact that Houellebecq contraste with the omnipresent real Moslems around them. But as if to finalize her symbolic Americanization she has also changed her name from Janine to Jane. The tragic trajectory of their lives, like the decay of France, is traced in Houellebecq's thesis to imported ideas.

Perhaps one reason why the American subtext has received so little attention is that few critics have bothered much with the actual novel - Adrian Tahourdin being a notable exception. Writing in TLS, he claimed that not since Michel Tournier's The Erl-King has there been a work of French fiction as rich in ideas (7). Le Monde found it to be simply "a good book that tries a bit too hard, no more, no less."(8) Despite this, the paper put Houellebecq on its front page an average of once every thirteen days for the first few months, and, by last count, has mentioned his name in over fifty articles. Its literary merits appear to have been beside the point.

Les particules élémentaires is, however, very much the point, for it is not merely a provocation, an excuse for a scandale but a well-crafted essay of ideas. It says many things to offend many peopld, but much of that is the product of the disordered minds of its protagonists. When Bruno suffers a sort of mental breakdown and begins to attack (in writing) a black student, it is transparently sexual jealousy that motivates him (both Bruno and said student are pursuing the same "beurette," to use his terminology). When he points out the absurdity of teaching Proust to his multiracial, Americanized students (who can identify only with Snoop Doggy Dog, or, at best, Bill Gates) we understand he is overstating the point. Still, we sense that the author is not exactly an impartial observer, and therein lies some of the passion of the book, and its power to inflame. He has taken every opportunity to mirror the attitudes of his novel's characters. He told Libération that he, like Bruno, hated the values of the 1960s, and he denounced his own education in a lycée "en pleine mode d'autodiscipline" as disastrous, a "carnage" - precisely Bruno's complaint. Michel's genetic breakthrough should not be regarded as evil because, Houellebecq said, cloning might be a good idea, unlike abortions which he regards with horror, anger, and disgust. Liberals and liberalism, he said, are "synonyms for evil", and "a liberal is nothing but a libertarian in power." To balance the oft-stated charges of misogyny, Houellebecq points out that the greatest outrage is not perverse feminism, but patriarchal society. Yet he gave ammunition to accusations of racism and homophobia by saving that the worst of male society is exemplified by blacks with their hateful cult of machismo, and gays who reduce everything to kitsch.

Given these statements, and many others like them, it's not surprising that the Right at first thought it had found an ally, and prematurely praised Houellebecq - especially ironic given that the book can be fairly called pornographic. Others thought him a Stalinist - in a much-quoted interview in Les Inrockuptibles, a trendy magazine that was the first to put Houellebecq on its cover on August 19, Houellebecq spoke of his admiration for Stalin, who had the sense to get rid of "anarchiste and Trotskyites." But in the end Houellebecq may merely be showing how ideas that are contradictory appear compatible in the depoliticized environment of 1999 France. Like Bruno, whose racist tract in the novel (titled, in homage to Beauvoir, "One is not born a racist, one becomes one") won the admiration of a fictionalized Philippe Sollers, the author recoils at the idea that his writing will give comfort to the "idiots" of the FN. When pressed for political conclusions, he has placed blame firmly at the feet of the United States, concluding that it's all the result of the "American entertainment industry" which has cynically reduced everything to a lower and lower level.(9)

Houellebecq has downplayed his personal similarities with Michel and Bruno - dishonestly, it seems. Like his earlier, only moderately successful novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, the author's life is not far behind much of the action. In that book, translated, unfortunately, as Whatever (Serpent's Tail, 1999), the narrator travers with a friend giving computer classes across France until, descending deep into depression, he suffers a nervous breakdown. Houellebecq, who had been a computer expert for the National Assembly, also was hospitalized for depression. His identification with the characters in Les particules élémentaires is even clearer. The brothers, born in Algeria in 1956 and 1958 to a bohemian mother and a mountaineering father, parallel the author, born in 1958 on the island of Réunion to similar parents. Like them, his parents divorced and left the children with grandparents, and he was raised in the same town as Michel, at the same lycée where Bruno ends up teaching. Like Bruno, Houellebecq felt cheated and victimized by the "American style" reforms in the French education system, and he also developed contempt for his "politicized" and "committed" school cohort. The similarities between Houellebecq's and Bruno's failed marriages have also been commented upon. While Houellebecq may not have urinated on his mother's grave, like Bruno, he does not appear to be, in principle, opposed to the gesture. In interviews, he seems to mix the personas of his half-brother characters. This use of interviews to continue the controversies surrounding the novel has been duly noted, and Marion Van Renterghem, writing in Le Monde, found that Houellebecq does not so much give interviews on a subject as use them to respond to his last interview.(10)

Many of those who have paid attention to Houellebecq's writing have found it to be revolutionary, some even see him as the founder of a new style - Le Figaro has called it déprimisme, Le Monde "post-naturalism," while Houellebecq himself prefers simply "new realism."(11) There is much in Les Particules élémentaires that is new - stylistically Houellebecq's voice is original. American readers may find familiar echoes, and this has led some to label it an "Arnerican"-style novel. Certainly there is some reason for this - there is a bit of the later Saul Below in Houellebecq's concern with humanity's inability to handle sexual freedom. His formula of 1960s commune culture turned into the unspeakable violence of the next generation, "serial killers being the legitimate children of the hippies," as he puts it (P. 261 ), resonates strongly of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, while the highbrow sci-fi/erotica may recall Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. But the vocabulary of the antiliberal, antimaterial, antimodern, and anti-American is French, and is carried over from the interwar era.

The cultural contradictions of capitalism are one of the ways Houellebecq continues in this tradition. The teen magazines that Michel observes appearing in the early 1970s are filled with Americanized visions of love and sexuality - ideas alien to France and nauseating to Houellebecq's character. Situated on the Left (by principles of feminism or rock music) youth culture had as its goal the support of consumer culture at large, which was determined to destroy the antimaterialist values of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Left gleefully participated in this, for the immediate result (the undermining of traditional society) was so seductive that the larger victory of capitalism was invisible. Meanwhile, other varieties of American consumer culture were being promoted. Houellebecq summarizes this right/left-liberal/libertarian convergence, and the confusion it wrought on the France of his characters' youth:

Cependant dans le même temps, la consommation libidinale de masse d'origine nord-américaine . . . se répandait en Europe occidentale. Parallèlement aux réfrigérateurs et aux machines à laver, accompagnement matériel du bonheur du couple, se répandaient le transistor et le pick up, qui devaient mettre en avant le modèle comportemental du flirt adolescent. Le conflit idéologique latent tout au long des années 60, éclata au début des années 70 dans Mademoiselle Age tendre et dans 20 Ans, se cristallisant autour de la question à l'époque centrale: "Jusqu'où peut-on aller avant le marriage?" Ces mêmes années, l'option hédoniste-libidinale d'origine nord-américaine reçut un appui puissant de la part d'organes de presse d'inspiration libertaire (le premier numéro d'Actuel purut en octobre 1970, celui de Charlie Hebdo en novembre). S'ils se situaient en principe dans une perspective politique de contestation du capitalisme, ces périodiques s'accordaient avec l'industrie du divertissement sur l'essentiel : destruction des valeurs morales judéo-chrétiennes, apologie de la jeunesse et de la liberté individuelle. (pp. 70-71)

What Emmanuel Mounier said in the 1930s (during the early days of Esprit - a journal Houellebecq invokes -as one that rejects Bruno's essays) is worth remembering. Capitalism, communisme and fascism are children of the Enlightenment - all descend from the same unshakable belief in matter - the same denial of the spirit. Mounier directed particular scorn in the 1930s towards the United States, just as he did in the postwar era, since America was the society that destroyed all spirituel values. Houellebecq, similarly, sees all those things that forced his characters to become elementary particles as coming directly from America. Like Robert Aron, Houellebecq sees America as wasting no time in exporting all of its destructive ideas, and he says, "there is not one example of an American phenomenon that did not succeed in submerging Western Europe within a few years. Not one" (p. 93).

The dilemma of Americanization, as Richard Kuisel calls it, continually finds its way into debates on the French nation, even as the new "European Century" begins.(12) The june 5, 1999 issue of The Economist devoted a special, twenty page supplement to France's résistance to "American" economic models. Most of the articles project grim, dystopian scenarios onto the relatively robust French economy, concluding, with more optimism, that the French will eventually have to accept an American "or at least more liberal" future. Some articles argue that the French masses want Americanization, and that it is primarily the stodginess of the elite that prevents its implementation. What The Economist underestimates is how much the argument over France's future has been fully and intelligently engaged by French critics. Despite the political exhaustion implied in Houellebecq's book, and apparent in French society on the whole, this is actually a lively moment in the dialogue about the meaning and future of France. A number of recent books present a defense of French republican tradition against the liberal, Americanized, European model, notably Régis Debray's La République expliquée a ma fille (Seuil, 1998) and Max Gallo's L'Amour de la France expliqué a mon fils (Seuil, 1998), both borrowing their titles from Tahar Ben-Jelloun's multicultural Racism Explained to My Daughter (New Press, 1998). A nationalist defense may seem odd coming from such establishment leftists, but for them French exceptionalism (as a means to universalism) still matters. In this way, Les Particules élémentaires, despite itself, enters into a political debate.

When Lire magazine asked Houellebecq about his dislikes, he provided a predictable list: Nietzsche, Viennese Actionists, ecologists, adolescents, hippies, satanists. He has also said that the only time in recent memory he voted was to oppose Maastricht. Given this broad a range, it's perhaps best to do as Le Monde did and throw in the towel - calling Houellebecq simply "unclassifiable." And perhaps, too, the fact that there is a Houellebecq affair, but no Houellebecqisme, is a telling sign - he will not lead an antiliberal revolution. But the power of "America" to unite diverse opinions in France has been observed throughout our century - especially at times of national soul-searching. The Socialists, the Right, the Communists, even the National Front are now in disarray. French republican values will survive intégration into liberal Europe, no doubt, but at what cost remains a question. What the affaire Houellebecq suggests, at the least, is that America still remains a most intriguing measure of French identity. France is now poised to become merely a European state, but the American Menace has not yet been vanquished.

* I would like to thank Fred Weinstein, Richard Kuisel, and Laurent Jean-Pierre for their assistance with this article.

(1) By "nonconformist" I refer to the generation of "spiritual" writers identified by Jean-Louis Loubet del Baye in Les non-conformistes des années trente : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, Seuil, 1969)

(2) The Goncourt committee's decision to ignore his book led to an attack by Houellebecq that was echoed by several French writers. Houellebecq accused the committee of always awarding the prize to books published by "teh big three" (Grasset, Gallimard, and Le Seuil) and called the 1998 winner, Paule Constant's Confidence pour confidence (Gallimard) "boring."

(3) Anti-Americanism as a unifying theme for spiritualist intellectuals is a theme I address in my dissertation, "Primacy of the spiritual: French Resistance to America and the Formation of French Identity, 1930-1950", SUNY at Suny Brook, 1998

(4) "Les nouveaux inquisiteurs: Le retour des chasses aux sorcières", in Le Figaro, 25 septembre 1998, p. 30.

(5) "La rage de ne pas lire", in Le Monde, 29 octobre 1998, pp. 17-18

(6) "Le procès Houellebecq", Le Monde, 8 novembre 1998, p. 10.

(7) "Generation 68", in TLS, Jan. 15, 1999, p. 23.

(8) Pierre Lepape, "Dernière station avant le désert", Le Monde des livres, 28 août 1998, p. II.

(9) "Houellebecq mutant moderne", interviewed by Antoine de Gaudemar in Libération Livres, 27 aoüt 1998, p.5.

(10) "Le procès Houellebecq", Le Monde, 8 novembre 1998, p. 10.

(11) "Arts abroad: Roman à Gripe Stirs Flames Among French," Alan Riding, New York Times, March 2, 1999.