Annihilation  

by Michel Houellebecq 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

544 pp., $30.00

I have been reading Michel Houellebecq for 25 years now. On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up his first two novels during a Paris visit in the first year of the millennium. The first was called Whatever, in the inexplicably dumb translation of the title for Extension du domaine de la lutte, perhaps better translated as “The Widening of the Conflict.” I read it in the airport and during the flight, completely enthralled by this startlingly insightful new writer who had put his finger so directly on the cultural pulse of the West.

Now, after a brilliant series of books that serve as a literary diagnostic of the serious and perhaps terminal disease under which the modern world is suffering, we have arrived at what Houellebecq tells the public is his final novel. He turned 69 in February, which would not be reckoned today as all that old if he were not a culturally traditional Frenchman who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish. Indeed, as I was reading Annihilation, and upon learning that the protagonist, Paul, has terminal cancer of the mouth, I feared that the novelist was, in his frequently autobiographical writerly method, telling us precisely why he was retiring. But, happily, this is not so.

Annihilation is a sprawling work. A principal element of the plot involves a bracing sketch of an exhausted French political establishment and a threat to its hegemony from a rising radical force, which is frustratingly undefined. It could be a reactionary Christian nationalist movement, or it might be extremist Homo sapiens-hating ecologists. Intellectual influences that would be likely for both forces—such as Joseph de Maistre for the Christian nationalists and John Zerzan for the extremist ecologists—appear in the novel to enrich the reader’s speculation as to what is going on here. The terrorist group’s targets include a sperm bank, a boat of African migrants, a Chinese vessel full of cheap commercial products, and a neuronal computing firm working to create hybrid beings somewhere between computers and humans. 

The central driving storyline is consistent with all of Houellebecq’s work. It concerns a human being’s attempt to find meaning amid the meaninglessness of the contemporary West. Houellebecq excels here. Modern Western culture is centered on expressive individualism and consumerism and is completely incapable of sustaining the spiritual aspect of human life. Many of Houellebecq’s novels lament the withering of the Christian religious narratives that served as the West’s cultural anchor for a millennium and a half, and his characters often dramatize the effects on individuals.

Paul Raison, the novel’s main character, takes his place among a long list of Houellebecqian seekers. He longs for something stable in the dense moral fog of modernity. Like other Houellebecq characters, Paul looks longingly at Christianity as an outsider seeking a way in. One thinks notably of François in Submission, the author’s 2015 novel, who struggles to return to Catholicism, even going on a monastic retreat. Ultimately, he converts to Islam, for the purely self-interested desire to get along in the new regime and to acquire multiple youthful wives. Paul is strongly attracted to the historic church in his neighborhood, the Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité de Bercy, and Houellebecq describes it adoringly. Paul leaves candles in this and other churches and contemplates prayer, without actually finding the will to pray. He looks fondly at the dedicated intensity of religious energy his sister and her family enjoy during the Christmas season. 

But he is just not up to it. Paul’s last name is Raison (“Reason”), and in the end he remains true to it, cheerlessly following Enlightenment rationality to the certain and eternal extinction of the grave. At the novel’s conclusion, and even when looking at the encroaching moment of his own death, he is still a soured materialist, hopeless and bleak. The title of the book gives away the depressing worldview with which its protagonist exits life.

This is one of the most emotionally draining elements of Houellebecq’s extremely autobiographical fiction. These characters who struggle with faith and fail to attain it are Houellebecq himself, of that there can be no doubt. One understands in reading his novels and in comprehending basic elements of his biography that he is struggling with faith and that he is wavering in the wrong direction. Every reader of Houellebecq’s novels who has been moved by them and who is himself endeavoring to maintain a life of faith might consider including the author in his prayers.

Paul’s sister Cécile and her husband—rigorously traditional Catholics and supporters of the right-wing National Rally Party—are the novel’s morally exemplary characters. Houellebecq knows it, although he could not have written a novel in which they were the central characters. It must be Houellebecq’s double, the more morally murky Paul, who takes that role. Yet Paul, too, understands what he lacks, and knows they have it. He is envious and yet incapable of taking the steps necessary to join them.

One of the negative aspects of much of Houellebecq’s work that he lingers so leeringly over sex acts in such a mechanical, brutally unemotional, even pornographic manner. It must be noted, though, that not all of his voluminous writing about intimate acts is devoid of moral and philosophical value. He is even capable of beauty when he writes on this topic. There are passages in Platform (2001), for example, in which the singular intensity of moments of union between a couple in love is conveyed in vibrant poetry. He is as close to transcending the pure materiality of sex in Annihilation as he has ever been. In the novel’s final third, Paul and his wife Prudence attain a bond of emotional power that merits description as “spiritual.”

It would not be a Houellebecq novel if it did not include gratuitous, morally outrageous episodes, and Annihilation has them. There is a singularly disturbing part of the plot in which Paul seeks out a high-end prostitute, reasoning that he needs to get into practice again before becoming sexually active with his wife after a lengthy period of distant abstinence. He consummates a sexual act with the prostitute before realizing she’s his niece, Cécile’s daughter, Anne-Lise.

In narrative terms alone, this element of the story is incomprehensibly bizarre. Why would Paul not just relearn physical intimacy with the woman he clearly loves? Perhaps Houellebecq is showing us just how thoroughly morally ruined Paul is. But the writer must have known how this episode would make it impossible for some readers to find Paul sufficiently empathetic to feel sadness at what befalls him. It is difficult to imagine Houellebecq deliberately sabotaging his character in this way. Whatever we make of his reasons, Houellebecq the author is insufficiently horrified by this grotesque turn of the narrative, as perhaps we would expect. He depicts Paul and Anne-Lise both effectively shrugging their shoulders over it. They are even able to see one another later at family gatherings without any emotional difficulty. 

Thankfully, Cécile does not learn of it, although this might have been a missed opportunity for Houellebecq. He could have thereby shown us which worldview—Paul’s crude materialism, or the muscular faith of his devout sister and her equally religiously serious husband—merits our sympathy in confrontation with moral corruption. That Paul and Anne-Lise are capable of such moral atrocity, of hiding this loathsome act, and of an absolute failure to feel any deep moral revulsion and self-loathing for it, is a telling point against Paul’s position—which in all likelihood is not far from Houellebecq’s. 

The final hundred pages of the novel are among the finest Houellebecq has written. In a shocking sequence of events, Paul discovers that a long-term toothache he has ignored is a cancer that has advanced past the stage at which it can even potentially be cured without major surgery. He decides to forego the surgery and tries other treatments that do not prevent the disease from quickly becoming terminal. 

The result is a literary treatment of the most impossible topic—death—that ranks with the greatest such efforts. Consider it alongside Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, or Cormac McCarthy’s various engagements with this theme in Blood Meridian, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men, The Road, and The Sunset Limited.

Houellebecq’s novels give us not only superb explorations of the moral dilemmas facing human minds. He is also capable of entwining those explorations with description of Parisian street scenes that will elicit delightful frissons of nostalgia in anyone who has spent time in the City of Lights, or has just seen a lot of movies shot there.

There is a passage in which Paul exits the office of the medical specialist who informs him of his cancer. The office is near Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement, a few minutes walk from the famously picturesque Rue Mouffetard. There, three days every week, an open-air market bursts splendidly into bustling life. There is a scene in Krysztof Kieślowski’s film Three Colors: Blue in which Juliette Binoche follows exactly the trajectory Houellebecq describes Paul navigating, ascending the long escalator to view a familiar pharmacy on Rue Monge. It is almost impossible to imagine Houellebecq was not influenced by this scene in the film.

Paul meanders through the market, contemplating the mundane pleasures of shopping there for fruit and sausages, pleasures that he now understands will soon be, for him, no more. It is a vivid, inexpressibly lovely, and almost unbearably melancholy passage. We should be grateful to Houellebecq for giving us such beautiful things.

Michel Houellebecq is easily the greatest living French novelist. There is no one of comparable talent poised to take his place. If this is indeed his last novel, we will miss him.