I THINK I’M GOING TO LEARN FRENCH, if only to keep up with Michel Houellebecq. The aging bad boy of letters has been embroiled in a fresh crop of scandals these past few years, the plotlines worthy of an X-rated soap opera on Canal+. First there’s his legal battle with Dutch art collective KIRAC—they collaborated on a pornographic film project together, in which audiences would have seen Houellebecq having sex with women other than his wife. He seems to have gotten cold feet after the trailer was teased, even though he’d already signed a release form. Then there are the accusations of plagiarism surrounding his 2015 novel Submission, which imagined France embracing Sharia law. Speaking of which, Houellebecq has also apologized for offensive comments he made in an interview published in Front Populaire. Meanwhile, Meta’s AI tool has refused point-blank to write in his style.
A short memoir titled A Few Months of My Life (Quelques mois dans ma vie: Octobre 2022–Mars 2023) was published last year, in which Houellebecq gave his account regarding some of these stories. Sadly, this has yet to be translated into English. Which brings me to my main reason for taking French lessons: I want to read his damn books as soon as they hit the shelves! His latest novel, Annihilation, was originally released in France in January 2022; the English translation was subsequently mired in a two-and-a-half-year delay.
Houellebecq is a troublesome (albeit bestselling) thorn in the side of the literary establishment. Rest assured, I didn’t open my advance copy with the kind of disdain I suspect will have radiated from some of my fellow critics, as if the PR department at Picador had mailed them a soiled diaper. I’m a Houellebecq fanboy and would happily jump into bed with him as part of an art project any day, if only he weren’t such a textbook heterosexual. After an aborted attempt to read Atomised in my late teens, I subsequently devoured all his novels in rapid succession in my early thirties.
I’d argue that Houellebecq shouldn’t be read by anyone under the age of thirty—the reader needs to have matured, like a stinky block of French cheese. No twentysomething still in possession of their youthful idealism can properly savor the poetic bleakness of a novel such as Serotonin. The perfect consumer of Houellebecq’s oeuvre requires a palate informed by their graying hair, sagging belly, and long-term exposure to the grinding realities of life. Several failed relationships under their belt are a must; a divorce, even better. The odd bit of erectile dysfunction for male readers wouldn’t go amiss. And still, against all the odds, the reader should believe that there’s something about Western culture worth saving. I like to think Houellebecq is an optimist deep down, and this new novel supports my gut feeling.
So, Annihilation. It’s a five-hundred-page epic about occult terrorism, a family reunion surrounding a comatose patriarch, the 2027 French presidential race, and mouth cancer—roughly in that order. The story centers on a middle-age technocrat called Paul Raison, who works inside the heart of government as an adviser to finance minister Bruno Juge (based loosely on the real Bruno Le Maire, a friend of Houellebecq’s who serves under Macron). France is on the receiving end of some weird cyberattacks, which then progress into actual terrorism on the world stage: A Danish sperm bank is burned to the ground, then a boat full of migrants torpedoed, killing hundreds onboard. The key to solving this riddle and catching the culprits may lie with Paul’s father, who for many years worked for the DGSI (the French security agency), but unfortunately he is recovering from a debilitating stroke, and the narrative bounces (as it does many times in the book) to a rescue mission in which Paul and his siblings (along with the help of a sympathetic nurse and a group of activists) attempt to extricate their father from the hospital and deliver him home into the loving care of his dutiful second wife. Succumbing to bedsores in a French hospital is akin to an act of state-sanctioned euthanasia, a subject close to Houellebecq’s own heart, as a 2023 article he penned for Harper’s testifies. Throughout the course of the book, Paul succeeds in rekindling the romantic—and physical—relationship with his estranged wife Prudence (they still cohabit, but had for years been living separate lives, as if they were merely roommates).
Hardcore fans of Platform and Whatever might think Houellebecq has mellowed somewhat, but there’s still plenty of his trademark black-humored venom—most of it reserved for Indy, Paul’s “predator” sister-in-law. Her mere appearance at the hospital provokes her otherwise vegetative father-in-law to muster up enough energy to move his eyeballs in an attempt to try and escape her.
In fact, Indy is a welcome presence in the book, as her scenes are the novel’s most entertaining. She works as a journalist, jobbing around various publications: “she had moved from the Nouvel Obs to Le Figaro, then from Le Figaro to Marianne.” I think what this translates to is the equivalent of her moving from the New Yorker to the Wall Street Journal, then from the Wall Street Journal to the American Conservative. Indy’s modus operandi is her desire for the family to flog the artworks produced by Paul’s late mother, whose sculptures are now stockpiled in a barn on the family estate. What we might call a mid-level artist, the mother also had a career as an art restorer, a job that in turn influenced her own work: “the gothic figures that she had spent most of her career restoring had doubtless influenced her; they were essentially chimerical creatures, monstrous combinations of animals and humans.” Indy’s plan having failed—due to a more or less nonexistent art market for the work—she will later weaponize her mediocre journalistic talents to take revenge on the Raison family, particularly her pitiful, IVF-cuckolded, soon to be ex-husband Aurélien. The couple have a son by surrogate, although it is later revealed that Aurélien isn’t actually infertile. What’s more, Indy chose the sperm of a Black donor, even though the couple are both white. The reason? “She had used her child as a kind of advertising billboard, a way of displaying the image that she wanted to give herself—warm, open, a citizen of the world . . . ”
Houellebecq’s female characters—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are always stronger and more fleshed out (literally) than the men, who often seem like a meek stand-in for the author himself. (“My variety is my female characters. The women are a more diverse world, more distinct personalities,” Houellebecq has previously stated.) Men take center stage in Annihilation, but the women are the puppet masters who run the show, whether as the devoted wives and carers, or the political operatives masterminding election campaigns. It is the religious devotion of Paul’s sister Cecile, a practicing Catholic, as well as Prudence’s somewhat eccentric embrace of Wicca, that offer any glimmer of salvation against Paul’s impending annihilation. Sadly (spoiler alert!) Paul’s toothache, mentioned in passing earlier in the novel, is soon revealed to be a particularly nasty oral cancer. Plotlines that had been built up over hundreds of pages are quietly shelved with no resolution. This is not a criticism: Although enjoyable, both the terrorist-thriller and the political-procedural subplots felt at times like Houellebecq was attempting to write an airport potboiler, but neither the author nor the reader could quite muster the energy to pursue these to conclusion—we’d all rather just polish off that nice bottle of red we opened earlier, and it’s better that way. Instead, the final part of the book is a deeply poignant, theistically suggestive masterpiece, one that will leave you both weeping and prodding your gums in front of the mirror, carefully searching for any suspicious lumps.
The novel is peppered throughout with references to faith: from the late-night Mass at Christmas to the gargoyle-like sculptures of Paul’s late mother. Am I right in suspecting the author is trying to not so subtly hint at something? Maybe there’s a deeper meaning to all of Paul’s dreams, which are described in laborious detail, like short stories, or to those out-of-body-experience testimonies, quoted from the Raymond Moody book Paul is reading. Prudence can alleviate her own impending grief due to her belief that the couple will meet again: “They would recognize one another at a deep level, and they would love each other again, although they would not remember their previous lives.” Houellebecq has stated that this is to be his final novel. Fingers crossed that won’t be the case, but if so, I hope that a future Houellebecq reincarnation will pick up where he left off, penning searing, fellatio-filled novels about the misery of life in the twenty-second century, and I hope karma will grant me the chance to keep reading them. Until then, we can only wonder if Paul encountered a light at the end of the tunnel, and whether Houellebecq has just written the great agnostic novel.
Annihilation is published by Picador in the UK on September 19, 2024, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux/McMillan in the US on October 8, 2024.
