Never underestimate the power of suggestion. Consider France’s latest literary sensation, Les particules élémentaires. We were prepared to believe, as all the advance publicity led us to believe, that the novel was an attack on what The New York Times called (in a piece published last March) “the failed dreams of the 1968 student protest movement.” Don’t believe a word of it. Advance proofs of The Elementary Particles (as Michel Houellebecq’s novel is called in English) arrived on our desk recently. Far from being an “attack on everything the 60’s generation holds dear” (as a profile of Houellebecq in the Times’s magazine of September 10 put it), the book wallows in the sex- and drug-sodden pathology of the 1960s. It is no more an attack on those excesses than was the Woodstock festival or William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

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