Book Review: ‘Annihilation,’ by Michel Houellebecq - The New York Times

Fiction

In what the author says is his last novel, both a family and a society are on the verge of collapse.

Michel Houellebecq Credit: Philippe Matsas/Editions Flammarion

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ANNIHILATION, by Michel Houellebecq; translated by Shaun Whiteside

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has the sort of notoriety, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote, that makes it easy to talk about him as if you’ve read him — even if you’ve not.

Cocktail in hand, one can praise or lament his skeeze factor. Houellebecq is fixated on the viscera of life, especially sex (massage parlors, porn, sex tourism), and his novels brim with the slumming-it detritus of quasi-intellectual existence: cigarette butts, empty wine bottles, ennui, cheap cups of coffee, pessimism, gruesome microwaved meals. Greasy are the hands that set his novels down.

He offers enough bones of contention, to the conversationalist, to build a skeleton. Second cocktail acquired, one can pick apart, or not, his mostly misanthropic opinions about immigration, abortion, Islam (“the stupidest religion”), consumerism, euthanasia, incels, the deterioration of the West, and what the French call le wokisme. He barely seems to aim yet nails his targets anyway. Houellebecq’s imagination and reactionary philosophizing are a frisson-making combination. His pushes pins through liberal instincts.

Those who relish his novels, which are best-sellers in France, compare him to Balzac and Camus. Those less taken with him use, as comparisons, the less salutary qualities of Nietzsche and Céline. So scabrous is his prose that his French publisher, Gallimard, recently complained that Meta’s A.I. tool, Llama, refused to write a scene in the style of Houellebecq, offering instead to write something “respectful and inclusive.”

Second cocktail nearly drained, some agreement can be found: He is eerily prescient. His novel “Submission” (2015), a black comedy about a Muslim takeover of French political life, was published on the same day as the Islamist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which left 17 people dead. Houellebecq happened to be on the cover of that week’s issue.

Houellebecq would not be worth arguing about if he were not so often a terrific writer — insouciant, shrewd and piranhic all at once. About his breakthrough novel, “The Elementary Particles” (1998), Julian Barnes wrote, and I agree, that it “hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbit.”

His new novel, “Annihilation,” is his eighth, and it gets off to a slow start, so slow that I debated abandoning my copy on a subway seat so that it could depress another passenger. That seemed cruel and random, so I hung on and finished it.

The second half of this 527-page (but longer-seeming) novel is even more tedious and disengaged than the first. Houellebecq has been many things over the course of his career as the bad boy of French literature, but this is the first time he has been thoroughgoingly dull.

The novel’s protagonist is Paul Raison — note the load-bearing last name. He’s an adviser to France’s formidable finance minister, Bruno Judge. The novel is set in 2027, a chaotic election year. Racial hatred is on the upswing in Europe, and the election may be won by a member of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party.

The plot of “Annihilation” grows in so many directions that it is like a tree without a trunk. This novel describes sophisticated terrorist attacks meant to destabilize capitalism and the West. These attacks give Paul a chance to utter this ur-Houellebecqian line: “If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.”

These attacks drop out of the novel; they become background noise, after first leading us into discussions of pentagrams, prime numbers and Wiccans. The book also dilates on illness and the scandal of end-of-life care facilities, political consultants, the sick soul of contemporary Paris, the perfidy of journalists, sex during middle age, distant mothers and the charms of alcohol, among other topics. There are many interminable paragraphs recounting the contents of Paul’s dreams.

There is a bleak joke about the plight of young people in publishing. When Paul, who is in a sexless marriage, visits a prostitute, he discovers that a) she is his niece, and b) she turned to sex work in part because her salary at a publishing house was so dismal.

“Annihilation” delivers a family reunion after Paul’s father, a former member of the French internal intelligence agency, has a stroke, and his bickering relatives gather in their country house to care for him. The final chunk of this novel detours into cancer drama, as if Houellebecq had thrown up his hands, as if he had no better idea how to keep the engine running.

The most interesting part of the cancer saga is that part of it is set in Paris’s ancient and imposing Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. The patient’s experience is contrasted with that of Philippe Lançon, the Charlie Hebdo writer who spent many months there after having most of the bottom of his face shot off during the 2015 attacks. Lançon’s memoir about his experience, “Disturbance” (2019), may be the best nonfiction book published so far this century.

The writing in “Annihilation” is slack, as if Houellebecq’s heart were not in it. There are many failed epigrams. He’s an arsonist who has lost his matches. A few lines here might make your grandfather drop his reading glasses into his muesli, but the novel is tame by Houellebecq’s standards.

In its ambitions to be an international thriller, and in its strong concern with palliative care for the sick and elderly, “Annihilation” most resembles “The Map and the Territory” (2010) out of Houellebecq’s previous novels. He tends to be at his best, however, when writing about characters that resemble himself.

Salman Rushdie, in his memoir “Joseph Anton” (2012), wrote that Kurt Vonnegut once said to him, “The day is going to come when you won’t have a book to write, and you’re still going to have to write a book.” That feels like the situation here.

Houellebecq, who is 68, has said that “Annihilation” is his last novel. I hope that’s not so. This is no way to say goodbye.