The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

Author:Michel Houellebecq
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375412646
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

At precisely that moment Bruno, exhausted and despairing, was taking his son back to his ex-wife. Anne had just come back from a package tour with Nouvelles Frontières to Easter Island or Benin—he couldn’t remember which. She had probably made friends with some of the women on the trip. They would have exchanged addresses, and she would see them once or twice before growing bored with them. She certainly would not have met any men. Bruno had the impression that she had completely given up on everything having to do with men. She would take him aside for a minute or two and ask how things had been. He would say “Fine” in the calm, self-assured tone that women like, before adding, a little facetiously, “though Victor did watch a lot of television.” He would quickly feel uncomfortable, as since she had given up smoking, Anne wouldn’t tolerate it in her tastefully furnished apartment. As he got up to leave, he would be choked with regret and again wonder what he could do to make things different. He would kiss Victor quickly and then go. His vacation with his son would be over.

In truth, the two weeks they spent together had been a nightmare. Lying on his bed with a bottle of bourbon in his hand, he listened to the sounds of his son in the next room—the toilet flushing after he pissed, the buzz of the remote control. Just like his half brother—though he did not know it—he stared dumbly at the radiator for hours at a time. Victor slept on the sofa bed in the living room and spent fifteen hours a day watching television. The set was already on by the time Bruno woke up every morning—Victor would be watching cartoons on M6 with the sound down and his headphones on. He was not a violent boy and did not mean to be rude, but he and his father had absolutely nothing to say to each other. Twice a day, Bruno would heat something in the microwave and they would eat at the table with hardly a word.

How had it come to this? Victor had just turned fourteen. Some years before, he spent his time drawing pictures he would bring over for his father to see. He copied characters from Marvel Comics—Fatalis, Fantastik, the Pharaoh of the Future—and made up stories for them. Sometimes they would play a game of Mille Bornes, and on Sunday mornings they would go to the Louvre. When he was six, Victor had made a card for his father’s birthday. On heavy drawing paper, he had written in big, multicolored letters: i love you dad. Now all that was past, over and done with. Bruno knew that things would only get worse, that they would move from mutual indifference to loathing. In a couple of years his son would try to go out with girls his own age; the same fifteen-year-old girls that Bruno lusted after. They would come to be rivals—which was the natural relationship between men.

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