It’s hard to get in the right mindset to read Michel Houellebecq with a sleeping infant strapped to your chest.

And by “right” I mean “convinced of the futility of youth, aging, parenthood and more or less everything else.” But Houellebecq also seems to take a Hulot-ish joy in the confusion and chaos — hence, hilarity — of modern life, so his bleakness isn’t exactly depressing. He’s funny the way Thomas Hardy is funny:

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others — notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone — that was all.

~ Far From the Madding Crowd