Bruno is constantly obsessed with his looks, the size of his penis, and the cruelty of an aging process that prevents you from getting any decent tail. He manages to get a wife and child, but the wife takes a job — knowing "that a woman's career was essential to her self-esteem" — and Bruno is as absent in his son's life as his own father was in his. In time, the marriage dies, and Bruno takes up with Christiane, whom he meets in a faceless encounter in a jacuzzi. Both happily tour the sex club circuit until Christiane discovers she has bone cancer. Bruno can't bring himself to look after her, and isn't around when she dies in a fall down the stairs.

Michel is loved by his childhood sweetheart, the perfect and beautiful Annabelle, whom he can barely love in return, try though he might. After three successive abortions, she too, like Christiane, will contract a fatal disease. Michel will go on to create a new society before he disappears somewhere in Ireland in the year 2009.

Masturbation, screwing, abortion, divorce, death — so goes the world, and everyone is finished before they start. Bruno and Michel are emblematic of the end of mankind, after first religion, then the culture of personal freedom, have peaked. It is during the "third paradigmatic shift" that the book concludes, when we discover just why the narrative explains even the simplest concepts — it comes from a post-human future, circa 2079, where terms like "happiness," "compassion," and "moral order" no longer have meaning. Michel's experiments in cloning have proven successful, and the world is populated by a newer, happier race, highly sexualized but free of egotism, vanity, the ability to reproduce, or individuality of any sort.

While I can't claim to have fully grasped all of its secondary scientific digressions, and despite its constant attention to clits and dicks and tits, The Elementary Particles is fairly digestible and at times moving. The book lectures us, and Bruno and Michel lecture each other, but I never found myself wishing for less discourse and more character development. Houellebecq boils down ideas rather nicely, and part of what makes his characters so pitiable is that they are unrealized human beings. The novel doesn't really rattle your preconceived notions about anything, (you often find yourself finishing the author's thoughts before he gets them out) but it's never dull or, importantly, off-message — a schizoid, modestly Machiavellian diagnosis of a culture in decline.