MixedThe Wall Street JournalIt is a broadside against Enlightenment individualism and all its works, which are seen to lead only to hedonism and despair, not the utopia of the philosophes' dreams … Mr. Houellebecq limns the post-'68 world through a mock-historical biography of two half-brothers — Bruno Clement and Michel Djerzinski, both born in the late 1950s. Their mother is a drugged-out, New Age hippie orgiast who ditched both her children in infancy. (Mr. Houellebecq himself had such parents.) Each son holds her responsible for his own failings, and her generation for the wreckage of society … It is also a riveting novel by a deft, observant writer. (Some of the deftness disappears in this mistake-filled translation.) Those who can make it past the sexual grossness will find a touching narrative that makes a new point: that not everyone using sex as a consolation for lost moral certitudes is blissfully ignorant that he's being taken for a ride.
