LOS ANGELES — I started reading The Elementary Particles (2000) this past summer. I railed through the first couple hundred pages fairly quickly, before stalling out on the last sixty-or-so. I finished it this past Thanksgiving.

In this episode, I explore Houellebecq's takes on the death of the nuclear family, extreme individualism in the West, and the value of declaratives.

Michel Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas in Réunion, France in 1956. Houellebecq is his paternal grandmother's maiden name. The Elementary Particles (2000), Houellebecq's second novel (orig. published Les Particules Élémentaires in 1998), was simultaneously hailed as a "nihilist classic" and criticized for its brutality. Michiko Kakutani, for example, called it "a deeply repugnant read."

Sean Thor Conroe was born Kamura Sho in Tokyo in 1991. He lives in the United States, @stconroe (http://twitter.com/stconroe) on twitter, and at http://1storyhaus.com.