Michel Houellebecq is a writer of the after—after history, after God, after politics, after romance, and after happiness. He chronicles a world in which we watch ourselves live, poisoned by irony, oscillating between nihilism and hedonism, until the difference between the two becomes imperceptible. Houellebecq captures this post-world without adornment. His characters are lonely, sexless, and impotent. They seek something higher and seldom find it. They try to escape from their condition but cannot. For Houellebecq, the impossibility of escape is the defining feature of our age. As he puts it in Platform (2001), “everything can happen in life, most of all nothing.” It’s not merely that nothing happens, but that nothing will happen. As a civilization, we may have done things in the past. But our present precludes the future tense.
To face our insignificance, we console ourselves with stories. That’s what much of contemporary literature does—it breathes life into inertia. Houellebecq, for his part, does not want to breathe life into anything or anyone, not even himself. Whenever he appears publicly, he does so disheveled, cigarette in hand, his face wrinkled and his eyes empty. He does not want to embellish himself any more than he wants to embellish the world. To his detractors, Houellebecq likes to quote Schopenhauer: “The first—and the only—condition of good style is to have something to say.”
Over the years, Houellebecq has had much to say, attracting admiration and admonishments. Enthusiasts call him subversive, even prophetic; critics call him reactionary, depressed, and depressing. Either way, Houellebecq fascinates because his novels announce the coming of catastrophes with uncanny prescience. Platform, which ends with a terrorist attack, was published just days before 9/11; Submission, which envisions an Islamist takeover of France, was released on the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015; Serotonin, which explores the misery of French farmers, anticipated the Yellow Vest protests of 2019. Houellebecq tells us who we are, sometimes so incisively as to erase the line between fact and fiction.
Yet those who describe Houellebecq as a “realist” miss the mark. Though he refuses to indulge optimism, he does not resign himself to reality, either. Jed Martin, the protagonist of 2010’s The Map and the Territory, repeats ceaselessly: “I simply want to give an account of the world.” To “give an account” is to make sense. Houellebecq, too, wants to “give an account of the world.” In an essay on H. P. Lovecraft, he writes: “Life is painful and disappointing. Useless, therefore, to write new realist novels. About reality, we know more than enough; and we don’t want to know any more.” Houellebecq confronts reality but does not stop there. He explores what lies beyond, behind our fears and frustrations and follies. A cartographer of experience, Houellebecq seeks a map for the territory of modern life.
Houellebecq deplores modernity’s emptiness and mediocrity, its excesses and neuroses, its temptations and contradictions. He likes to blame the sexual revolution, capitalism, secularism, individualism, liberalism, and the other usual suspects. Unlike many reactionaries, however, Houellebecq understands that all these things are not going anywhere. They’re part of us, as inescapable as water is to fish. We cannot capitulate to them, for doing so would forgo our humanity. But we also cannot get rid of them without turning back the clock of history. Trapped in this uncomfortable in-between, we must try to live religiously without God, seeking transcendence while knowing that we can no longer reach it. In other words, we must make peace with modernity even as we wage war against it, within ourselves.
This paradoxical posture, reluctantly modern, animates Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir (Annihilation in the new English translation by Shaun Whiteside). This 550-page symphony, which one critic called “a political thriller veering into metaphysical meditation,” will not merely frustrate readers with its length. In a harsh but fair review, the academic Anton Jäger writes that the book “drags itself from one sonata to the other without ever settling on a unifying theme . . . as if it was written compulsively and in haste.” Houellebecq does not make it easy to see how the pieces fit together. The beginning of the novel follows a simple story, but the narrative eventually shifts into a stream of consciousness, in which Houellebecq ponders death, television, politics, and a dozen other themes that never quite coalesce. For Jäger, “none of this amounts to any clear declaration of intent or desire.”
Yet Annihilation, perhaps better than his other novels, contains Houellebecq’s definitive statement on modernity. Much of the novel takes place in a hospital, where bureaucrats “manage” their patients on the way to death. Neither cynical nor sinister, Houellebecq expresses his indignation at the contemporary treatment of death, hoping to awaken something higher in us, something distant but not completely absent: a capacity for wonder and contemplation. Houellebecq takes us on a slow, painful tour of a reality that has become slow and painful. He does not tell us that we can change the world, but he does encourage us to change our attitude toward it, one thought at a time. The novel rambles because it offers a procession of exhortations, each more compassionate than the last, to find sparks in the void.
Houellebecq asks us to revolt against modernity within ourselves, for revolting—in vain, knowing that we’re bound to fail—remains the only way to save our humanity. Read by itself, Annihilation exasperates more than it delights. Read alongside Houellebecq’s other writings, however, it offers a remarkable reflection on the tragedies of modern life.
When Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte), appeared in 1994, one critic accused the engineer-turned-writer of déprimisme, or “depressionism.” From the first page, Houellebecq despairs with such zeal as to turn depression into a worldview. We learn that the protagonist feels “gently depressed,” but the depth of his misery does not seem so “gentle.” His therapist tells him that his pain “has a name: depression,” to which he responds: “I am now officially depressed. Not that I feel particularly low. It’s just that the world around me does not seem particularly high.” Lowering the world for those who mistakenly elevate it: ever since, that has been Houellebecq’s mission.
Every encounter becomes a competition between the lucky few and the frustrated many. Every belief is a lie, every interaction a fight. Every action or utterance deserves suspicion. Depression is no longer a malady that afflicts individuals alone but an all-encompassing force, infecting everything, everyone, everywhere. Toward the end of Whatever, as the protagonist retires to a nursing home, the narrator observes: “All around us, desire itself disappears; there remains bitterness, jealousy, and fear. Especially bitterness—immense, inconceivable bitterness. No civilization has ever developed such bitterness.”
In a world worthy of despair, the absence of depression becomes its own pathology. Houellebecq resents those who hide their misery behind upward-trending graphs; they’re the real madmen. “The official version is that everything is going well, everything is getting better, and only neurotic nihilists could deny it. Well, count me among them,” he writes. For Houellebecq, to deny the existence of suffering is to lie.
All his characters suffer, but never nobly. Their suffering tears them apart precisely because it is banal. They’re not Shakespearean heroes, wrestling with the calamities of fate, Christian martyrs mutilated for their virtue, or ancient warriors falling on Troy’s battlefield. They do not suffer in the name of anything or anyone but themselves, unremarkable creatures with unremarkable problems in an unremarkable age. In The Possibility of an Island (2005), the protagonist speaks of the “uninterrupted torture that is human existence,” but the “torture” amounts to little more than romantic rejection. When Houellebecq opens his 1991 essay “Rester vivant”(Staying alive) with “the world is but suffering unfolded,” the “suffering” that he decries does not deserve any admiration. Suffering turns into depression—and depression into déprimisme—because its cause, at bottom, is human insignificance.
Houellebecq is not merely depressed, however, and reading him is not merely depressing. He gives up on civilization but never on individuals. He refuses to abandon morality and embrace cynicism. In fact, in all his novels, Houellebecq employs the adjective “cynical” as the worst of pejoratives. Comfortable with disenchantment, the cynic is “vulgar, brutal, cruel, and evil.” Nothing, not even the absence of hope, the end of history, the death of God, or the shadow of injustice, can justify resignation. Amid the worst of tribulations, human beings can retain their capacity for wonder. In the foreword to his nonfiction collection, Interventions (2020), Houellebecq writes:
Humans do not lead a purely material existence. In parallel to their own lives, they do not cease to ask themselves questions that deserve to be called—if not for lack of a better term—philosophical. I have observed this impulse among all social classes, from the humblest to the most elevated. Physical pain, sickness, and hunger cannot extinguish the fire of existential questioning . . . which contrasts so vividly with the cynicism of our time.
Optimism and cynicism are both lies, but only the latter “extinguishes the fire of existential questioning.” Houellebecq despises our tendency to look at the noblest virtues—faith, loyalty, generosity—with ironic distance. We laugh at those who pray and view those who help others with suspicion. Cynicism reduces us to cold, calculating creatures who prefer to imagine ulterior motives than to acknowledge that morality exists. We become so incapable of goodness that we deny its existence in others. From Schopenhauer, Houellebecq borrows the pessimism but also the belief that humans are “metaphysical animals.” The capacity for wonder and the capacity for goodness are the only qualities worth admiring in our species. In an interview, Houellebecq declares: “All systems of hierarchy seem equally detestable to me; the only superiority that I recognize is that of goodness.” Elsewhere, he adds: “I remain a romantic . . . who reveres chastity, sainthood, innocence; I believe in the gift of tears and in the prayers of the heart.” These are not the words of a nihilist.
Yet Houellebecq is not truly a “romantic,” either. To call him déprimiste is to miss his thirst for enchantment; to call him hopeful is to underestimate the depth of his agony. Neither resigned nor cheerful, he finds balance in the oscillation between depression and wonder. The first grounds him, and the second lets him soar beyond the carcass of his “material existence.” While Houellebecq feels cynicism’s pull, he never yields to it. In The Possibility of an Island, the protagonist, Daniel, defines himself as a “bitter cynic.” But he falls in love with Isabelle and recovers “a state of innocence” that forces him to admit that he “manifestly overestimated his own cynicism,” even if he and Isabelle part down the line.
The same pattern applies to other Houellebecq novels: a character confronts the decadence around and within himself, attempts to revolt, fails to change anything, but somehow recovers the best of himself in the process. This arc is not a promise of redemption so much as an invitation to look for what matters within. We might never reach happiness after the death of God or achieve glory after the end of history, but it’s up to us to protect the dreams, desires, and delusions that make our lives distinctly human.
Houellebecq often sounds like a reactionary. He hates modernity, which “fuels our desires until they become unbearable while making their realization impossible.” He also hates capitalism, which keeps us in constant motion, always working, always creating, always consuming. In perpetual movement, we are always “busy” but never do anything. Achievement requires time and distance; we lack both.
The Greek word for leisure is scholē, the root of “school.” We need relief from the pressures of the world to develop ourselves, the ancients believed; Houellebecq does, too. Without spaces of reflection, we remain selfish, brutish, and cruel. Our humanity depends on our ability to rest, to find refuge from competition. That’s what capitalism does, Houellebecq believes: it turns everything into a competition. Life becomes a battlefield for status, and status is expressed in money. “Money becomes our sole idea, our sole law, our sole companion,” he writes. “Capitalism is a permanent war, a permanent struggle that cannot reach an end.” The market removes all the obstacles in its way, undermining communities. Houellebecq dedicates an entire novel, The Elementary Particles (1998), to the death of alternatives to our market society. Houellebecq was perhaps the first to call our predicament “atomized.” Toward the end of the novel, he adds: “this process of destruction will continue until nothing remains.”
Endless competition, frustrated desires, aimlessness, restlessness, “atomization”—Houellebecq speaks the language of the reactionary, resents the same people, and hates liberalism (in the European sense) with the same fervor. He even closes his poetry collection, Le Sens du combat (1996), with the essay “Last Bulwark Against Liberalism,” halfway between a manifesto and a tirade against modernity:
We reject the liberal ideology because it is incapable of giving meaning, of reconciling the individual with a community that deserves the title of human. . . . We reject the liberal ideology in the name of the encyclical of Leo XIII on the social mission of the Church. . . . We must struggle for the submission of economics to considerations that I dare to call ethical. . . . When I hear about 3000 people getting fired I suddenly want to strangle half a dozen consultants. . . . Trust the individual, they say . . . but the individual is a small animal, cruel and miserable, who does not deserve our trust unless he is disciplined by the principles of morality.
Except for the “strangle half a dozen consultants” phrase, every word in this essay could appear in a nineteenth-century Catholic pamphlet. Houellebecq recites all the reactionary themes: liberalism “is incapable of giving meaning,” we must reconcile “the individual with a community,” work for the “submission of economics” to ethics, acknowledge the “cruel” nature of individuals—and he even adds a papal reference for good measure. Houellebecq knows that these platitudes, accurate or not, will not persuade anyone to abandon the liberal Enlightenment. Yet he cannot help but close an otherwise remarkable poetry collection with a polemic that makes him sound like a poor man’s Joseph de Maistre, as if to fuel his detractors’ worst caricatures of his work.
Perhaps Houellebecq finds the caricature of himself amusing. Perhaps he means every word. Either way, unlike Maistre and his successors, Houellebecq believes that neither God nor the Church can save us from modernity. Houellebecq’s protagonists seek transcendence, but their efforts to find the divine always end in failure. In Submission, for instance, Houellebecq envisions an Islamist takeover of France. But even the Islamist party, once in power, capitulates to neoliberalism. When the novel was published, conservatives praised Houellebecq’s “prophetic warning,” while progressives accused him of Islamophobia. But the “submission” that Houellebecq anatomizes is not that of France to Islam but that of religion to modernity. Even Islam, a more vigorous faith than what remains of Christianity in Europe, cannot withstand the onslaught of liberalism.
After losing his job, François, the protagonist of Submission, seeks refuge in a monastery. As he enters the sacred space, the first thing he encounters is the gift shop, symbol of everything that the monks claim to fight. He then turns to a statue of the Virgin Mary, which gives him such “an impression of spiritual power” that he feels the pull of “sacred and mysterious” forces. For a moment, Houellebecq suggests the possibility of escape, the awakening of “a bygone universe” beyond the predictable dance of atoms. But a few minutes later, François realizes that he cannot will himself into believing something: “I stood back up, deserted by the Spirit, reduced to a damaged body, and I made my way back to the parking lot.” François fails as an individual; Islamism fails as a political movement. Both point to the same stubborn reality: if Islamists and Catholic monks cannot escape from modernity, neither can we.
Houellebecq does not laugh at those who seek God. On the contrary, he obsesses over the irreplaceability of faith. As the narrator of The Elementary Particles puts it, “to its need for rational certainty, the West has sacrificed everything: its faith, its happiness, its hopes, and ultimately its life.” First faith, then the rest. For Houellebecq, the death of God leaves us with fewer and fewer reasons to live. The absence of God weighs heavier on us than his presence ever did. Houellebecq likes to quote Pascal, who speaks of “the misery of man without God.” Man is a religious animal who killed his creator, robbing himself of purpose.
Condemned to perpetual pain, we seek higher horizons that we can no longer reach. In one of his letters, Houellebecq writes: “A world without God, without spirituality, scares me terribly. . . . But here’s the problem: I still don’t believe in God.” Adamant about faith but resigned to its impossibility, Houellebecq drifts away from the Church despite himself. In Whatever, Jean-Pierre Buvet, a priest, declares: if “our civilization suffers from exhaustion, only Jesus can save us.” A few chapters later, Buvet begins to doubt and can no longer say Mass in good conscience. “I no longer feel his presence,” he despairs, to which the protagonist responds: “Whose presence?”
Annihilation begins in 2026, during a presidential campaign. The outgoing president, who shares everything with Emmanuel Macron but the name, has managed France’s decline without reversing it. Some jobs were created but mostly “precarious and underpaid” ones. Economic growth held up, but “the gap between the ruling classes and the population has reached unheard-of levels.” The president, who once imagined making France “a start-up nation,” has “abandoned this fantasy” and settled on keeping the status quo alive. In the campaign, the president’s successor and current minister of the economy, Bruno Juge, continues to make the case for “humanist centrism.” But a young far-right challenger is rising in the polls, and mysterious cyberattacks are starting to happen. The novel follows the life of Paul Raison, one of Juge’s advisors and confidants.
The opening of Annihilation brings together many of Houellebecq’s key motifs: a nation in decline; an elite of neurotic professionals; a disenchanted populace; economic precarity; social upheaval; terrorism; and a bureaucrat-protagonist in a tired marriage. Yet, about one-third of the way in, Houellebecq leaves everything behind to turn the novel into a hospital memoir. Paul leaves Paris to visit his father, on life support after a stroke. Along the way, he encounters his sister Cécile, his brother Aurélien, and his mother, Suzanne. And then we learn that Paul himself has cancer; the final part of the book follows his own march to the end.
The structure of Annihilation feels uncomfortable. We expect one kind of story and get another. We begin with a feverish campaign and end with claustrophobic encounters in a hospital. Houellebecq makes no effort to ease the transition. The tone shifts abruptly from episode to episode. The narrative slows, to the point of becoming downright painful by the end. Paragraph-long diatribes about religion, television, fascism, and—most of all—death proceed as we follow Paul’s scattered stream of consciousness. The style gets sparse, simpler than Houellebecq’s usual writing—sometimes so simple that one wonders whether any style remains. Houellebecq occasionally interrupts Paul’s tirades with descriptions of forests or sunsets, which seem to serve no purpose but to let us catch our breath before another wave of reflection. To no avail—after a phone book’s worth of metaphysical ramblings, the final page feels like a deliverance. Annihilation is a hard read.
And that seems to be the point. Houellebecq’s career shows that he knows how to write pleasantly when he wants to do so. For this novel, he did not. At one point, Paul observes that “human life consists of a sequence of administrative and technical difficulties, interspersed with medical problems.” More than any of Houellebecq’s previous writings, Annihilation forces us to confront the tediousness of modern life. The transition from the campaign to the hospital seems abrupt because it is. For a bureaucrat who lives for the petty pleasures of party politics, staring at death turns the world upside-down. Paul realizes that everything he cares about doesn’t matter. In hundreds of pages, we witness the collapse of his universe. We experience the pain of existential questioning by someone who has never before left the meritocratic treadmill. Paul used to think about the shape of graphs; his dreams—to the extent that he had any—were mostly about sleeping with his boss’s wife. Now, he faces a torrent of fears and doubts that he spent decades avoiding.
As the novel descends into more suffering, Paul ascends to higher planes of reflection, uncovering new parts of himself. For the first time, he has no choice but to pause and ponder. He rushes from one unfinished thought to another—and so do we—because this exercise in contemplation is new to him. The reader’s experience accompanies Paul’s: erratic, hesitant, anxious, with two or three sublime sentences for every ten pages of frustrating frivolities. Houellebecq takes his time because he wants us to take ours. That’s what might be necessary to recover what most of us have lost. In these painful paragraphs, we get to see the best in Paul—but these moments never feel heroic or exhilarating. The task remains arduous, barely bearable.
Houellebecq encourages no illusions about death or the terrors that it raises in us. Disenchanted moderns, we can no longer find refuge in the promise of divine justice or eternal bliss. But death is an invitation to change our attitude toward the world. By the end of Annihilation, we no longer care about the presidential campaign or the cyberattacks. Politics and economics seem small before what Paul confronts in the hospital room. If the centrist wins, the status quo will persist. If the populist wins, the status quo will persist (after a few years of instability). Either way, who cares? Politics ultimately does not matter. The Catholic poet Charles Péguy once wrote that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” For Houellebecq, the opposite is true: we begin with politics and must somehow find our way back to mysticism.
In Annihilation, death leads us back to mysticism. Contemplating his father’s demise, Paul, an otherwise rational technocrat—so rational that it’s his last name—begins to reflect on the way we sanitize sickness. “Illness [has] become obscene . . . and fatal illnesses [are] the most shameful of all.” Why has it become so taboo to “look sick” in polite company? Why is death “the supreme indecency”? Why do we avoid the disabled and “hide the old” in nursing homes? Why does he work for a government that supports euthanasia? Paul obsesses over these questions until the answer becomes evident: we are terrified of death not merely because it reminds us of our mortality but also because it forces us to ask about things that we prefer to avoid.
The death of God, the end of history, the ravages of modernity—these are bearable burdens, so long as we keep ourselves entertained, in perpetual movement, always young and beautiful. The second we start coughing, the moment we encounter the gaze of an old man on the brink of death, these diversions disappear. We stare at ourselves honestly, at last, a shattering encounter that Paul experiences firsthand. This encounter is what we try to avoid, even at the cost of a terrible cruelty: “We can no longer stand old people, we don’t even want to know that they exist, and that’s why we park them in specialised places away from the eyes of other human beings.”
We can read Annihilation as a critique of euthanasia and nursing homes. But Houellebecq sets his sights higher. Our mistreatment of death is a sign that we need to inject wonder and goodness into our lives. Houellebecq’s real enemy is not the medical system but the nihilism that his critics sometimes accuse him of propagating. Toward the end of the novel, in the most arresting of his reflections, Paul seems to say as much:
In all previous civilizations, the esteem . . . that a man could be given, what allowed people to judge his value, was the way in which he had effectively behaved throughout his life. . . . By granting greater value to the life of a child [than to the old] . . . we deny all value to our real actions. Our deeds, whether heroic or generous, all the things we have managed to accomplish . . . none of that has the slightest worth in the eyes of the world any longer—and, very soon, even in our own eyes. . . . Devaluing the past and the present in favour of times to come, devaluing the real and preferring a virtual reality located in a vague future are symptoms of European nihilism. . . . I am even inclined to believe that it all began with Christianity, this tendency to become resigned to the present world, however unbearable it might be, as we wait for a saviour and a hypothetical future; the original sin of Christianity, in my eyes, is hope.
The passage captures Houellebecq’s contradictions. He seeks to escape from nihilism but cannot turn to hope; in fact, he blames nihilism on hope. He seeks to escape from disenchantment but cannot turn to Christianity; in fact, he blames disenchantment on Christianity. He wants to reclaim “heroism” but recognizes that ours is an antiheroic age. He wants to defend the “real” against the “virtual” but is the first to admit that the “real” doesn’t have much to offer. Yet he somehow expects us to choose the “present” against the “future,” armed with nothing but our capacity for wonder. No matter what he says to the contrary, Houellebecq does remain hopeful—hopeful that we can find a home in the world, or just try to find one, knowing that we cannot. As the narrator of Annihilation puts it, “he had always imagined the world as a place where he should not have been, but which he was in no hurry to leave, simply because it was the only one he knew.” This is not the most effusive invitation to live, but it suffices for Paul. Houellebecq believes that it must also suffice for us.
Houellebecq’s philosophy asks us to perform an uncomfortable double movement. First, we must recognize that ours is a decadent time, from which neither God nor nature can save us. In one of his poems, he writes: “the second we get out of our powerful Mercedes,” we “stumble upon an abject universe devoid of meaning / made of stones and brambles, flies and serpents.” We must meet that reality head-on, without illusions or adornments. But then, we also must refuse to embrace disenchantment and retain our capacity for wonder. In other words, we must make peace with modernity, while revolting against it, within ourselves. Why within ourselves? Mostly because Houellebecq does not believe in politics. Asked whether he would ever vote for Marine Le Pen, he answered: “I’m too wealthy to vote for anyone but Macron.” This need not mean that Houellebecq supports what Macron represents, of course, but that the right battlefield is not the political arena but the individual. Some of our problems might come from politics, but our solutions must come from elsewhere—from us.
In one of his first interviews, Houellebecq says that he writes to convey “a monstrous lack that only poetry can express.” This “lack” refers to the emptiness of our era, when all that remains is “the conversation of machines,” when “information fills, triumphantly, the empty corpse of the divine.” Houellebecq laments but also consoles. He does not show us a way out but a way further in. Confucius once quipped that “when a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger.” Encountering Houellebecq’s lamentations, many have mistaken him for a nihilist who does not find modern life worth living. But to read him as a déprimiste is to read him backward.
Ultimately, Houellebecq offers not escape from reality but entrance into it. He asks us to rage against disenchantment, knowing that we will lose. He insists that we accommodate this double movement. He reminds us that if we cannot be romantic heroes, then perhaps we can be tragic ones.
Top Photo: Michel Houellebecq (© Imago / Bridgeman Images)
