There’s more to this controversial writer’s novels than bleak cultural criticism and sordid sex. His new book even has a happy ending

In June 2024, French publisher Gallimard asked Meta’s AI bot to write a scene in the style of Michel Houellebecq. The bot apparently declined politely, claiming it couldn’t write something offensive and discriminatory. Instead, it proposed a sunny scene about friends singing songs of love and inclusivity.
It’s hard to imagine something further from the spirit of Houellebecq’s novels, which are above all about the extreme individualism of modern life. Houellebecq’s protagonists find themselves severed from community, tradition and most forms of human relationship by a decadent and atomizing world.
“We live in a world in which there are no more links,” Houellebecq once told an interviewer. “We’re just particles.” And yet there’s something unmistakably Houellebecqian in the idea that the novel — that medium for exploring the human being in all its moral ambiguity — might be replaced by the meaningless digital mock-ups of an algorithm with a despotically simple moral outlook. In spite of itself, then, the AI bot managed to produce a scene right out of a Houellebecq novel.
Whatever might replace him, Houellebecq is phasing himself out. The celebrated and reviled enfant terrible of contemporary French literature has declared that “Annihilation” (published in France as “Anéantir” in 2022) will be his last novel. If so, it will be the capstone of an impressive and controversial career.
Houellebecq emerged into literary celebrity with his second novel, 1998’s “The Elementary Particles,” which follows two half-brothers as they navigate the cultural fallout of the 1960s. In what would become a pattern for Houellebecq, the novel was divisive: admiringly compared with the work of Albert Camus, on the one hand, and disparaged (by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times) as “a deeply repugnant read,” on the other. His 2010 book “The Map and the Territory,” an art-world thriller featuring a fictionalized Michel Houellebecq, won France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
Houellebecq’s most controversial novel is surely 2015’s “Submission,” set against the backdrop of a French election in which a candidate from a fictional Muslim party slowly but inevitably prevails. In a remarkable coincidence, “Submission” — which was widely accused of propagating Islamophobia — was published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. Houellebecq’s face — in unflattering caricature — was on the magazine’s cover at the time. The book immediately became a bestseller.
It’s not that Houellebecq has predictive powers, as some of his admirers have claimed. It’s rather that he has a keen eye for strains in the social fabric and a fearlessness verging on the reckless for exploring — some would say exploiting — those strains. At his best, Houellebecq is a provocateur of the highest kind, prodding his readers into second-guessing their calcified or half-baked beliefs about themselves and their societies. His satire can be sharp and exact, and he wields big ideas with ease. At his worst, he’s a very public bigot.
Houellebecq’s latest novel, “Annihilation,” bears some resemblance to “Submission.” Both take place in the near future — “Annihilation” in 2026-27 — and both use surprising developments in French electoral politics to drive the plot forward. But “Annihilation” is a very different book, significantly longer and slower than “Submission” — or, for that matter, 2019’s “Serotonin,” which takes a yellow vest-style farmer’s revolt as its backdrop.
When the new novel begins, France’s security services are scrambling to understand a series of cryptic and threatening videos that have been released online. As “Annihilation” builds, these videos are replaced by real-world acts of sabotage on highly symbolic targets, including container ships and a sperm storage facility. It’s not clear what the various targets have in common, but the saboteurs are so technologically advanced that the very viability of the global order seems to hinge on cracking the code.
The novel’s protagonist, Paul Raison, is drawn into these efforts both because he works for the French Minister of Finance, who was targeted by one of the early videos, and because Paul’s father — convalescing from a bad stroke — was once one of the country’s most gifted cryptographers. Paul begins as a typical Houellebecqian protagonist: a high-level French bureaucrat for whom life is as effortless as it is meaningless. He and his wife separate shortly after buying a luxurious apartment, which Paul later comes to see as perfectly reasonable: “an improvement in living conditions often goes hand in hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.”
But Paul is literally and metaphorically dreamier than previous Houellebecq protagonists. The reader first meets him in the midst of a dream in which Paul finds himself on a train driven by no one, “hurtling at full speed across a deserted plain,” while the temperature keeps dropping and his fellow passengers die one by one. Unusually for Houellebecq, we get many of Paul’s dreams and reveries as the novel unspools.
His last name is French for “reason,” but Paul seems incapable of reasoning about anything of importance, and especially not about his own life. “Reflection and life are simply incompatible,” he muses. In a sense, the book’s strange thesis is that this insight can be turned from a source of grief into a mantra for living well.
Houellebecq’s greatest authorial gift is surely his ability to articulate the overwhelming sense that we’ve lost control of our lives, individually and collectively. Readers are likely to find his novels insightful or obnoxious to the extent that they share his diagnosis.
But there’s more to his novels than bleak cultural criticism (and sordid sex scenes). Like the best pessimists before him, Houellebecq brings gaiety to his grouchiness. When his curmudgeonly characters complain, as they so often do — about the state of French culture, sex, modern architecture — they give full vent to their spleen, savouring it like a last cigarette. For the reader, the experience is like watching a haggard old grizzly scratching itself voluptuously against a tree.
Consider the description of Paul’s battle with his wife Prudence over space in the refrigerator, after she becomes vegan. “The first attack launched by Prudence was brutal, absolute and decisive.” The refrigerator had been “invaded … by a multitude of strange foodstuffs including seaweed, soybean sprouts and numerous ready-made dishes of the Biozone brand, combining tofu, bulgur, quinoa, spelt and Japanese noodles. None of it struck him as even vaguely edible.” After several attempts to repopulate the fridge with meats and cheeses are rebuffed, Paul is permitted his own small strip of shelf, which he eventually fills with microwaveable meals from the French grocery chain Monoprix, settling sadly into “a kind of morose epicureanism.” What makes this more than just a silly satire is the sheer pleasure the author takes in rendering this fridge as a site of marital breakdown.
Houellebecq does world-weariness well, and this is a world-weary novel. But it’s also a novel about happiness. What’s more, according to the author himself, “Annihilation” is a novel with a “positive conclusion.” This is highly uncharacteristic — as is the means by which that positive conclusion is brought about: the saving power of love and an embrace of new age spirituality. (There’s a lovely passage in which Paul pulls over at a lookout in Beaujolais and feels a “single, vegetable deity” communicating to him through the landscape’s total silence.)
Readers will reach their own conclusions about how seriously Houellebecq means all of this as a solution to the pathologies of modern life, but it raises questions worth asking and takes him into new and touchingly humane territory. It’s a satisfying ending, and “Annihilation” is a satisfying conclusion to an important body of work that — whatever its moral limitations — remains much more worthy of our attention than the inane regurgitations of an AI bot.