Another return to an older favorite. This book, Houellebecq's second, is a staggering leap above and beyond what the author suggested himself capable of in his first novel, Whatever. Such beautiful and moving tragedy emanates from the pages; seriously moving in such a sad way. Houellebecq's familiar focus here is the fallout of the aged, wasted and unloved bodies of those who were so *liberated* in the sexual revolution of the 60's, and the children who grew up unloved, neglected, or resigned to other guardians after the unplanned accident of their birth.

Houllebecq's works are not for the unexamined ideologue who views unmitigated freedom and so-called liberation as a necessary, inviolable right, or a necessary practice. There are terrible downsides to the limitation of freedom, certainly, although there are peculiar downsides to unmitigated freedom as well. Houellebecq hammers this point home in a tragically poignant way. With that said, however, Houellebecq is no polemicist. His work is nuanced and, to or against his credit depending who is asked, oozing with a tragic humanism. Houellebecq you can tell wishes beyond reason to find humanity as worthy of redemption, though he seems to have resigned himself to the futility of his wishing. His is a sort of cynical idealism; a humanism punctuated by a weary sigh.

Two half brothers sharing the same mother meet many years later, both of them given up by their mother (Houellebecq, too, was abandoned by his own hippie mother) so she could pursue her dream of spiritual enlightenment and untrammeled sexual freedom.

Bruno is a loudmouthed, overweight and largely impotent man who, for most of the novel, staggers through one failed or botched encounter after another, going so far as to attend sexual retreats only to face further rejection.

Michel is emotionally sterile and interested in science above all, resigning his first possible relationship to obsolescence only to meet the girl he loved after twenty years of silence....

Bruno and Michel enter into relationships in their middle ages, facing impotence, sterility, the approaching infertility of their partners, and the advancement of certain medical conditions that threaten the life they've squandered in pursuit of sexual pleasure; a life that has led them to such dreary ends, a life of dissatisfaction, a life of estrangement from their children, a life where they will inevitably die alone - "Both of them knew that this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together."

Having lived a life entirely without joy or pleasure, and his reformed relationship coming to no good end, Michel devotes himself to his scientific research at the end of his life, making a breakthrough that will radically alter the course of human evolution and the human experience; a breakthrough that leads to the premise of Houellebecq's later The Possibility of an Island, his greatest novel.