Michel Houellebecq’s skills as a stylist don’t get the respect they deserve. Yes, he has been called France’s most important novelist, but praise is generally lavished on his ideas, not their expression. Maybe that’s because he’s a ranter whose prose can feel dashed-off and portentous. He’s the opposite of an aesthete, putting his fiction to work savaging ideologies he despises. There’s a long list of those: feminism, self-actualization, globalization, neoliberalism, commercialism. In short, the man writes like a crank.
What Houellebecq does get credit for is prescience. To give only two examples: In his 2015 novel, Submission, a seemingly moderate Islamist party exploits a parliamentary crisis to take over the French government, then imposes Sharia law. Submission came out the same day that two Algerian Muslims stormed the office of the satirical Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo and killed 17 people; the magazine had published profane cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Houellebecq’s next novel, Serotonin, published in 2019, depicted French farmers blocking roads to protest agribusiness and the European Union, whose policies were putting them out of work. A few months before the book reached the public, but well after it was written, workers in yellow vests, later known as the gilet jaunes, took to the highways, initially to protest taxes on fuel but eventually also French President Emmanuel Macron’s tax cuts for the wealthy and other vicissitudes of his neoliberal agenda.
But Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling. The France of his recent novels has been a devastating parody of itself. The countryside, emptied of farmers and colonized by second-home owners, is a dying theme park; the cities are often as deserted as a shopping mall in the age of e-commerce; and people aren’t having enough sex to repopulate the void. This is “what the world would look like … after the explosion of an intergalactic neutron bomb,” Houellebecq wrote of a French village in The Map and the Territory. In his latest novel, Annihilation, his protagonists wander through that barren world, disoriented, looking vainly for an exit.
Houellebecq’s men—he doesn’t do female leads—are misanthropic and sexually dysfunctional and have more success with consumer products than they do with women, or most anyone else. They dilate lovingly upon the makes and models of cars and appliances, and the subsidiary brands of hospitality and conglomerates. You can almost hear the author swirling around in his mouth the fake compounds dreamed up by naming consultants—Canon Libris (a laptop printer), Ibis Styles (a hotel chain)—savoring the evocative gobbledygook. One of the great scenes in The Map and the Territory involves a close reading of the instruction manual for the Samsung ZRT-AV2 camera, which features absurd settings such as FUNERAL, OLDMAN1, and OLDMAN2, as well as BABY1 and BABY2, which will reproduce the freshness of babies’ complexions as long as you remember to program in each baby’s birthdate.
Satirists are famously also moralists, and Houellebecq is no exception. Indeed, he’s a religious writer, even though his scabrous novels usually scoff at established religion. His notoriously pornographic breakthrough novel, The Elementary Particles, trafficked in masturbation, flashing, orgies, and child rape but really amounted to a diatribe against a godless materialism. Submission was received in some parts of France as a warning that the nation would succumb to Islamism if it didn’t watch out. Houellebecq sometimes reinforced this interpretation, saying at one point that he was an Islamophobe. Yet he has also said he believes that religion has a social role. In a Paris Review interview, for instance, he suggested that the novel expressed a “real need for God.” Which God would that be? Houellebecq doesn’t know: “When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.”
Annihilation is another conversion novel, this time about a secular Frenchman’s awakening to that same ineffable cosmos. Paul Raison—the surname means “reason”—is a bureaucrat who lives at a vacuum-sealed remove from ordinary human intercourse. Before he joins his siblings at their father’s hospital bed after a stroke, Paul hasn’t seen his sister for seven years—or is it eight?—and last saw his brother so long ago that he isn’t sure he’ll remember what he looks like. And although Paul shares an apartment with his prim wife, aptly named Prudence, they rarely see or speak to each other. Houellebecq recounts the phases of their marriage as a series of skirmishes between brands. One day Prudence fills their refrigerator with ready-made tofu and quinoa meals from Biozone, leaving just one shelf for Paul’s St. Nectaire cheese and other beloved artisanal products. Roughly a decade later, he has been reduced to eating solitary microwaveable poultry-tagine dinners from the gourmet section of the supermarket chain Monoprix.
Paul works for France’s finance minister, Bruno Juge—“judge” in French; never underestimate Houellebecq’s willingness to hit readers over the head with allegory. Bruno is a classic technocrat, calm and, yes, judicious, untroubled by doubt or other emotions. He serves a president widely thought to be modeled on Macron, France’s neoliberal leader. (Bruno himself may be modeled on Macron’s onetime finance minister Bruno Le Maire.) Like God, who judges from on high, a finance minister has the power to determine who shall thrive and who shall struggle. Bruno’s main accomplishment is turning the ailing French automobile industry into a force capable of making luxury cars that are competitive with Germany’s. Bruno refinanced French industry by means of a whopping tax cut designed to stimulate investment. There’s no point in trying to revive the mid-range auto market, because it is disappearing along with France’s middle class—which Bruno doesn’t consider it his job to shore up. He deals with industry. Social problems don’t fall into “his field of expertise.”
Houellebecq ambles through Paul’s and Bruno’s bell-jar lives and political maneuverings at a languorous pace, but enlivens the narrative with irrupting counternarratives: hallucinatory communiqués from—well, where exactly they come from is the theological conundrum of the novel. These missives are of two kinds: dreams and videos. Houellebecq recounts Paul’s dreams in inordinate detail; they are, alas, as hard to sit still for as the ones you might hear around the breakfast table. The second counternarrative involves progressively more terrifying videos going viral worldwide. One of them shows men in hooded robes cutting off Bruno’s head in a guillotine. The videos provide a running commentary on the main plot. “The choice of decapitation, with its revolutionary connotations, only underlined his image as a distant technocrat, as remote from the people as the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime,” Paul thinks.
The scary thing about the videos is that they are eerily realistic. As a leading special-effects expert says about one depicting a vast meadow, “no two blades of grass are identical in nature; they all have irregularities, little flaws, a specific genetic signature. We’ve enlarged a thousand of them, choosing them at random within the image: they’re all different … it’s extraordinary, it’s a crazy piece of work.” Who’d be capable of making these, and why? The mystery thrusts the novel into Black Mirror territory—which, given Houellebecq’s real-world record of predictions, is actually kind of alarming.
But then the mystery more or less fades from view, to be replaced by another that comes and goes in a flash but lingers like an afterimage. It’s the template for a spiritual revelation that is slowly (very slowly) processed. As a teenager, Paul was obsessed with the Matrix franchise, a series of four dystopian cult-classic movies sermonizing conspiratorially on the possibility that evil AI entities have enslaved humanity by plugging us all into a simulacrum of reality. During a visit to his childhood home, Paul comes across his poster of the third movie, The Matrix Revolutions. It features Keanu Reeves in the role of the hero, Neo, who uncovers the Matrix’s terrible truths. He’s “blind, his face covered by a bloody bandage, wandering in an apocalyptic landscape,” Houellebecq writes. Sure enough, we’re about to see Paul encounter his own matrix. Confronting mortality, he will begin to suspect that what seems unreal is realer than known reality; he will wander through his own hellspace.
The operative verb is wander. Annihilation ponders and meanders. Perhaps its pensiveness heralds its 68-year-old author’s shift into a mellowed, late-style phase of his career. Paul’s spiritual quest steers him surprisingly close to New Age creeds that the author, as a young man, would have made fun of. I found myself missing the curmudgeonly Houellebecq. But he can still perform his literary tricks. His digressive riffs convey sociopsychological truths better than the action does, as in his gloss of the mygalomorph spider, which “does not tolerate the company of any other animal, and systematically attacks any living creature introduced into its cage, including other mygales.” He pauses to offer pleasingly cynical social commentary. I liked the story of how the local council pimped out the village Belleville-sur-Saône, changing the name to Belleville-en-Beaujolais because “Beaujolais” would hold more appeal for Indian and Chinese tourists.
Annihilation’s best bit of shtick involves the overuse of acronyms. The government analysts get their briefing at the General Directorate for Internal Security, four words mostly replaced by the letters DGSI, which are then repeated over and over. Soon we’re being shot at by a firing squad of lettrist nonsense: BEFTI, FNAEG, PEoLC, and so on. I don’t think I took this typographic gibbering for cant just because my French is out of date. Houellebecq doesn’t like experts—that’s what Bruno comes to show—and rebarbative acronyms are the language that experts use to put the rest of us in our place.
“What do you know about PVS and MCS?” a medical pooh-bah demands coldly when Paul, in the course of a briefing on his father’s condition, ventures some acronyms he picked up from the nurse. “Oh nothing, I must have read something on the Internet,” Paul says sheepishly, trying to appease her by sounding stupid. The matrix is a prison of the mind, and Paul is its prisoner; Houellebecq is not wrong to accept the premise that, to a greater or lesser degree, we are all hooked up to it. But I trust his sarcasm, more than his mysticism, to free us.
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