Wood on Houellebecq

Better late than never.

For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist -- and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it. Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, on the French island of Réunion, in 1956, where his accomplished mother, a reader of Mann and Dostoevsky, worked as a doctor. His father, René Thomas, had left school at thirteen, but was a keen reader. (He liked Céline.) He worked as a grocer, a gardener, and finally as a mountain guide. The only full account presently available of Michel's peculiar childhood is Demonpion's lumpy biography. In it, both Houellebecq's father and mother talk with remarkable frankness about how willingly they abandoned their small son. "I have above all lived my life rather than his, but I knew he was in good hands," the father tells Demonpion. When Michel was five months old, his mother's contract was terminated, and the parents decided to cross Africa in a Citroën 2CV. Michel was sent to live with his grandparents in Algeria, where he stayed until 1961. By this time, his parents had divorced. Subsequently, Michel grew up in France with his paternal grandmother, whose name he later took as an act of solidarity with the woman who raised him. 

Houellebecq is suffused with a great sense of righteous vengeance, personal and cultural. For him, his parents' selfishness is emblematic of the sexual revolution that would sweep through the 1960s. "In a sense, it was one of the precursors of the vast movement of familial dissolution which was going to follow," he says in Demonpion's book. "I developed the clear consciousness that a grave injustice had been committed in my regard. I developed out of this a concern for my father and a great disgust for my mother." 

In his fiction, Houellebecq prosecutes this "vast movement of familial dissolution" with a Nietzschean hammer. His "diminished adolescents" are all orphans of the 1960s.