Early in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, its professor hero talks about what makes a writer worth reading: “[A]n author is above all a human being ... and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters — as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them. (It’s strange that something so simple, so seemingly universal, should actually be so rare …)”
Few writers are more present than Houellebecq, the international literary superstar who’s one of a handful of writers who invariably jangles my nerve-ends. Trenchantly ironic about our self-centered society, his novels are barracuda-toothed provocations, idea-laced fictions filled with dodgy sex, joyless masculinity, swipes at Islam, derision toward '60s freedoms, contempt for the media elite, attacks on the EU and casual misanthropy. Houellebecq is surely the most acclaimed literary figure to have praised Donald Trump. In France, he’s routinely called a genius — or a creep.
In fact, his fiction is brainier, trickier and more stimulating than his polarizing reputation suggests. It’s not just that his novels have been eerily prophetic about what’s happening in society. He cuts to the heart of things in a way that makes most of his American counterparts look like well-schooled functionaries doodling prettily on the margins of life.
A sense of doom — social and personal — looms over his new novel, Annihilation, which the 68-year-old Houellebecq has said will be his last. Although far from his best, it’s a fascinating book tinged by mortality. You can feel this one-time bad boy crawling out of his comfort zone to do something he’s pointedly not done before: explore middle-class family life and the healing power of love.
As usual, Annihilation features a de-centered male hero. Fiftyish Paul Raison is a high-level Paris bureaucrat who’s in a sexless marriage to another bureaucrat, Prudence. Bored and vaguely disaffected — he doesn’t believe in much of anything — Paul’s going through the motions, when his world starts falling apart.
In the public sphere, there’s a series of cyberattacks designed to send seismic shocks through the existing global order. In his personal life, his father has a stroke, and Paul’s forced to engage with his family, especially the devoutly Catholic sister he’s been largely ducking for years. Even as he’s confronted by an often-byzantine medical system, he must deal with a group of anti-government radicals, and a health crisis of his own.
Although deftly translated by Shaun Whiteside, Annihilation is slow getting started and too diffuse by half — I began skipping the boring dream sequences. But Houellebecq has always had one of those narrative voices that draws you in, as in this book’s opening line: “Particularly if you’re single, some Mondays in late November or early December make you feel as if you’re in death’s waiting-room.”
Houellebecq’s major works — Atomized, Platform, Submission and Serotonin — were all worshiped or reviled for their seeming cynicism. Yet beneath their dryly funny, sometimes shocking surfaces, they’re the work of a radical conservative — to borrow a description Norman Mailer used of himself. Houellebecq’s books dissect how, in our modern society, people, in particular men, feel hollowed out. “Anything can happen in life,” says the hero of Platform, “especially nothing.”
No longer bound by the old religious, national and tribal belief systems, Houellebecq’s characters inhabit an atomized world whose individualism leads to the bleak consolations of technology, consumerism and the soulless sex typified by pornography. His great satire, Submission, in which Islam takes over France, was pilloried as an attack on that religion. In fact, it’s a book about a French culture so decadently anemic that it finds a kind of comfort living under the certainties of Sharia law.
Dismissive of both the Left and market-driven society, Houellebecq is such a sly and ambiguous writer that I’m not always sure when he’s kidding. I often identify with his characters, and even when I find certain pages repellent, Houellebecq challenges my perceptions. He gets me asking whether I’m in touch with my real self, or whether I’ve unthinkingly donned a set of attitudes passed on by our culture.
And in Annihilation, he surprised me. After a career spent, as he puts it, “clearing away the sources of hollow optimism,” he ends Paul's story with some of the tenderest pages — and tenderest sex — of his career. This is a book about discovering the ties that bind and about letting yourself be bound by them. Filled with acceptance if not serenity, it has the happiest ending you can have in a book by a writer who doesn’t believe in happiness.
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