Houellebecq on Parenting

A recent biography of the French writer Michel Houellebecq confirmed what most readers probably already suspected, namely that much of his fictional work was taken directly from 'life'. The figure of the mother, in particular, has been singled out for especial abuse in his work. Like the appallingly negligent mother in Les Particules élémentaires, according to this article in the London Review of Books (via Arts & Letters Daily) Houellebecq’s mother “was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle” (in the book she “joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys”).

As for Houllebecq’s father, well, he was dispensed with at the beginning of Plateforme:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

Houellebecq himself was abandoned by his parents, “who set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. Michel only saw his parents during the holidays. “‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’"

Indeed, Houellebecq condemns not only his parents but their generation of hippies and soixante-huitards for all manner of social disaster. In Atomised, the cult to which Bruno’s mother belongs turn from free love to ritual murder. In one of the most quoted passages from the book, Houllebecq writes: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’

Given the monstrous injustice Houellebecq feels was commited against him by his parents, one might think he’d treat his own children a little better, in his books, if not in life. In life we learn that Houellebecq produced a child from a short early marriage. How sad, then, to read in his latest book, the following: ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’