Michel Houellebecq — arguably the most important French writer of the past quarter-century — was perched on the seat of his chair like a bird. We were sitting in his dim Paris apartment in August, a spectacularly beautiful day visible through his curtained windows, to discuss his new novel, “Annihilation,” which appears this week and returns to the themes of male loneliness and civilizational decline that have made his reputation. During our time together, Houellebecq, who is 68, would slump deeper and deeper in his chair, to the point where it seemed he would need help rising, only to pop back up, with unexpected agility, to balance once again on the balls of his feet. I had been trying to ask him about his life, but he was deftly deflecting personal questions — he had been answering them for decades and seemed done with that dance — until I asked him to tell me a little bit about his early life as a reader.
“I have moved too many times in my life,” he said in his weak, reedy voice. “But I kept one of my favorites.”
Houellebecq rose and searched a bookshelf near at hand, retrieving a small, well-worn book. It was “Les Contes d’Andersen,” a French translation of the Danish fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, No. 28 in “Lectures et Loisirs,” a series of books for children. This particular copy was published in 1960, four years after Houellebecq was born. On its cover, a little mermaid sat on a pink shell, weeping. An oyster, its pearl gleaming, lay open at her feet, and a blue fish with a pink tail and lush eyelashes looked at the mermaid with worry.
I noted the cover, felt the furring at its edges, commented on the mermaid’s tears.
“One would console her right away,” Houellebecq said tenderly, staring at the cover, adding, “immediately.”
Houellebecq sat back down and poured himself a glass of white wine. He was quiet for a long stretch, a common feature of his conversation throughout his career, many interviewers noting that they were unsure, while waiting for him to respond, if he had fallen asleep. This habit drew my attention to his physical presence, which, anyway, is conspicuous. His hair had often been, during his public life, messy and strange, a signature comb-over taking various permutations, sometimes daringly long, always a kinky brownish curtain. Now it was nearly gone, his sparse gray hair swept back. His nose is fantastic, prowlike, and he has large, long ears with those creases across the lobes that internet ads suggest mean heart failure looms. He wore delicate blue-and-white-striped slip-ons, his clothes unchanged across the three days I saw him: baggy black pants salted with cigarette ash and a deep blue shirt that, owing to its epaulets, lent him a vaguely military air. You would assume he chain-smokes, and you would be right, except the term doesn’t go quite far enough; so constant was the smoking that it seemed his cigarettes were little oxygen tanks he drew on to sustain life.
As Houellebecq put the Andersen in my hands, he told me what amounted, itself, to a fairy tale. His mother, a doctor, and father, a ski instructor, left him at 6 to be raised by his paternal grandmother in northern France. His grandmother was uneducated, Houellebecq has said, but one day, in the cellar of the house, he found two large chests. What was in them? Hundreds of books. Holding the book he handed me, I imagined Houellebecq’s small hands holding those books as a boy. The chests in the basement, Houellebecq said, had everything: In the “Lectures et Loisirs” series were “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Three Musketeers,” versions of Balzac and Dickens and Swift simplified for children, not to say other, weirder stuff, Stalin’s writings and a Reader’s Digest series of condensed books that included stories of ordinary people who had done extraordinary things. Houellebecq read them all and reread them, dozens of times: There was nothing else to do. They were poor; there was no shower in their house; television was a luxury. Instead, books. Of course, they must have belonged to his father, or an uncle or aunt, family wealth otherwise denied him. In its place, this pot of gold.
Fairy tales and Michel Houellebecq might not seem a natural fit. Opinions of Houellebecq and his work have always been — divided would be a hilarious understatement — vehemently opposed. Things he has been called with regularity: controversial, provocative, nihilistic, misogynistic, racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, disgusting, foul, a sentimentalist, self-promoting. Things he has also been called: unprecedented, essential, daring, sensitive, inspired, mischievous, brilliant. When he publishes a book in France, or when he hasn’t in some time, or when one of his books has been adapted for film or television, or when he has directed an adaptation of one of his books, or when he has a part in a film, the coverage continues. Which is to say: One way or another, coverage of Houellebecq is total.
Every novel Houellebecq has written has engaged, in some meaningful form, with the cultural convulsions we’ve been living through. From his first novel, “Whatever,” which imagined the empty professional lives of two young men, a computer programmer and one of his colleagues, he has brought to bear the observational punctiliousness of a dedicated cultural anthropologist. Though his books revolve around tectonic civilizational shifts, he has found ways of balancing that breadth against close-up views of private suffering. His books are certain that our species is finished, that despite our gifts, we are, nonetheless and poignantly, doomed.
“I admire him,” the French novelist and journalist Emmanuel Carrère told me. “I think he has a unique historical vision and a unique ability to think ‘out of the box.’ A writer named André Rouveyre said that André Gide was, in his time, the ‘contemporain capital’ — the central contemporary. One can certainly say that about Houellebecq. In France, his following is huge, perhaps unprecedented.”
“Whatever” attracted a cult following and sold well enough to allow Houellebecq to quit his day job and pursue writing full time. His second novel, “The Elementary Particles,” was his first best seller. Published in France in 1998, it centered on two miserable male protagonists, half brothers. One is a molecular biologist who, by book’s end, finds a way for humans to cease reproducing by biological means and instead begin cloning themselves. The other declines into sex addiction and despair. The novel’s popularity revealed the extent to which readers were looking for an expression of their loneliness that was radical in its frankness: If sex is unfulfilling and degrading, why not find a way around it? Houellebecq followed that breakout book with “Platform” (2001), published in France just before Sept. 11, which imagined events around a travel agency that pushed sex tourism in Thailand and ended with an Islamist terrorist attack. (A year after it appeared, Islamist terrorists set off a series of bombings in Bali.) The protagonist in “Platform” holds deeply racist views, among them, “Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought that it meant one less Muslim.”
The ugliness of this is appalling and unambiguous. The views that many of Houellebecq’s characters express — about sex (empty), about women (Madonnas or whores), about Muslims (to be kept away from the West) — are shocking, but they are also, and importantly, real views that real people in the real world hold. Houellebecq has said that he is not a provocateur — “No, no,” he told The Guardian, “a provocateur is someone who goes too far just to get on people’s nerves.” Though his books lean into all the ugliest views of the now, they are calculating, not offhand; precise, not feckless; ambiguous, not plain.
His novels wouldn’t be as cutting — or as moving — as they are without their tone, the way the narrator’s sly amusement and authorial intrusions seem to ask, Can you believe these poor bastards? In a footnote in “Annihilation,” Houellebecq comments on his characters this way: “One always describes oneself as ‘quite a good guy,’ but deep down one is not deceived, deep down one always has that secret scale that places one at the exact center of the moral world.” Serious but not self-serious, he is fond of folding in fitting quotations from French writers like Pascal and Apollinaire, linking the reader’s experience of his characters to responses, through time, from thinkers who have engaged with the same questions or felt the same feelings. In this way, his novels cunningly straddle the low of living and the high of cultural seriousness. The books also balance, at times comedically, on an autobiographical edge. In the Prix Goncourt-winning “The Map and the Territory,” from 2010, Houellebecq skewers his own fame by making himself a character. He is slaughtered by a killer who chops him up into little pieces and then scatters him around his home — just what many people have, metaphorically, wished to see happen to him. It is his humor, bathos that achieves pathos, that has made him, I think, as popular in France as he is.
The trouble with accepting Houellebecq’s characters as bold aesthetic constructs has arisen not so much from the books themselves as from his public remarks, the degree to which, as one critic put it, the reader is put in the position of having to play “the game of guessing how much Houellebecq the man has in common with his self-degrading protagonists.” While doing publicity for “Platform,” Houellebecq described monotheistic religions as stupid — Christianity, Judaism, Islam — adding that, of all the stupid religions, Islam was stupidest. He was sued in France for hate speech and charged with inciting racial hatred. At a hearing, he defended his statements, in part, by pointing out that the holy texts of these religions don’t preach peace or love or tolerance but hate. He was ultimately acquitted, the judges ruling that expressing hatred toward Islam did not amount to doing so toward Muslims.
Houellebecq has also seemed incapable of imagining a complicated interior life for his female characters or for women. In our conversation, we touched on sex work and porn. His sense — hardly original — was that sex work serves a useful economic purpose and provides a meaningful service. In talking about porn, he spoke of the beauty of videos he has seen in which couples are engaged in loving sex on OnlyFans and how marvelous it was that they decided to share it with the world. I suggested that most such videos are revenge porn. While he conceded that this might be the case, he was not to be dissuaded. This was paradoxical in the extreme, given his own collaboration in 2022 and 2023 with a Dutch art collective, KIRAC, on an erotic film. It depicts sex between young women and a man, who may or not be Houellebecq (his agreement stipulated that his face and genitals not be shown in the same frame). Houellebecq sued to stop its release, and in a subsequent book on that period in his life, he refers to the male filmmaker as “the cockroach” and to a female KIRAC member as “the sow.”
The most violent collision between Houellebecq’s art and his life occurred on Jan., 7, 2015, the publication day of his sixth novel, “Submission.” In the book, set around the French presidential elections of the near future, the ruling party in the French government, impotent and adrift, allies with a moderate Islamist politician, Mohammed Ben Abbes, to fend off the far right. He wins, managing to stabilize a France in turmoil through the imposition of Islamist values and patriarchal rule. “Submission” is a complicated book that can be read as Swiftian satire: The cure for Ireland’s poverty is to eat its children; the cure for social and political rot in France is to embrace Islam. It is both the embodiment of Western fears of Eurabia and a dig at them: Houellebecq later said he was, absolutely, playing on the growing fear of Islam in France and, as if to acknowledge the slipperiness of his own textual provocations, that he was “probably” an Islamophobe himself. Even so, “Submission” does not read as an Islamophobic novel. Rather, one in which the bankruptcy of French society is solved by “canceling” Western culture. Houellebecq’s narrator-protagonist, François, is, once again, a miserable middle-aged Frenchman, this time a Sorbonne professor who specializes in the novels of Huysmans and whose great joy in life comes from his girlfriend’s talent for fellatio (she eventually leaves him). Through François, who struggles with being a white man whose moment of power, in the West, has passed, the fate of France is rendered sad and slightly ridiculous.
The day “Submission” was published, two Islamist terrorists killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which, in 2012, famously ran a cartoon of a naked Prophet Muhammad on all fours. On the day of the attack, a drawing of Houellebecq — which had him satirically predicting that in 2015 he would lose his teeth and in 2022 he would celebrate Ramadan — ran on the cover. The attack killed a friend of Houellebecq’s, the economist Bernard Maris. Houellebecq stopped doing publicity for the book in France and reportedly received police protection.
Whatever Houellebecq may have in common with his protagonists, the books themselves exhibit all the complexity that his public remarks do not. His male protagonists, lost and in decline, frequently pay for their views not by some dramatic change in plot but with an inner life corrupted by their passive ugliness. Houellebecq has shown himself to be both a writer whose instincts are old-fashioned — Stendhal’s image of the novelist as a man who walks down the street holding a mirror — and radically of the moment, willing to expose the sordid, despairing interiority of much of first-world private life.
As he once told Susannah Hunnewell, the late publisher of The Paris Review, when she asked how he has the nerve to write some of the things he does: “Oh, it’s easy. I just pretend that I’m already dead.”
The day we met in his Paris apartment, Houellebecq was very much alive, at least to the pleasures of reading. “Andersen’s stories are still very good,” Houellebecq told me, the ash on his cigarette now perilously long. “I still read them with pleasure.”
In the volume that Houellebecq held dear, the first tale is called “Ib and Little Christine.” I had no memory of “Ib” despite having read and reread as a child a three-volume collection of Andersen’s stories, one that I loved for its covers of blue, gold and green and that, at some point, I lost. “Ib” is simple: A poor boy and a motherless girl are so inseparable that they are referred to in the village as “the betrothed.” One day, they lose themselves in a wood and meet a witch who gives them magic nuts to wish on. Their wishes come true in unexpected ways, but by adulthood they have lost each other. Late in his life, Ib encounters a girl on his travels who pleads that he help her. He follows her into a dark, filthy dwelling to a bed where her mother is dying. Ib sees that it’s Christine. “Ib looked at the little girl and thought of Christine in her young days. For her sake, could he not love this child, who was a stranger to him?” After her mother dies, little Christine comes home with him: “Ib was to her both father and mother; her own parents had vanished from her memory, as a dream-picture vanishes alike from childhood and age.”
It hadn’t occurred to me until he handed me the Andersen stories how much the fairy tale has in common with his novels. Like all fairy tales, Houellebecq’s novels pivot around disenchantment. Fundamentally there is a loss that fairy tales, especially Andersen’s, are registering, a flaw in the weave of the world that a child is discovering and having to reconcile himself to. The losses are fundamental: of home, of family, of love, of life. One might say that such losses are the meat of all novels and leave it at that, but there is another quality that is perennial in Houellebecq: the way the almost that seemed possible in childhood becomes the never of adulthood, a never from which something can nonetheless be salvaged.
Houellebecq’s apartment had a feel, if not of disenchantment, of decline. He had been living there for only three months. A refrigerator still had the large store stickers advertising its features; a few vintage posters were taped, as if in a dorm, to a wall in the dining room; a half-empty display case held a few Schleich animal figurines. Houellebecq is the owner of two cows, which he put in one box, some piglets, together in another, three corgis (the breed of dog Houellebecq used to have) and, high above the rest, cheerfully staring down, a hippo, strangely the very same one my son was given that very week, for his birthday.
The bookshelves were sparsely filled, with copies of his own books, some of them — limited editions to be given as gifts by Houellebecq and his publisher — encased in inch-thick Lucite-like containers, hulking transparent things that suggested that the interior objects were artifacts only to be viewed, not read. The black veneer table where we sat had an empty crystal vase at its center and a near-empty bottle of wine that Houellebecq was growing drunk on. A narrow bed that would have suited a child jutted out from the wall, a little table adjoining it with a variety of medicines. The bed faced a modest television, fed by a beefy surround-sound system, clearly one of the first things to which the new tenant had attended. The overall vibe of the place was that of a man newly divorced who has come to live out his years in despair.
But the apartment was only a pied-à-terre. He lived for eight years in Chinatown, where, he told me, he liked being the only white man. He chose the new place for its proximity to the Gare Montparnasse, where he could most easily board a train — after sorties to Paris to attend to things like talking to me — and head to his new home in Normandy. He moved to Normandy, he said, because there you could buy a big house cheaply. By house, he meant one built in the 18th century, a castle basically, though he didn’t show me a picture. His wife, Qianyum Lysis Li, who is 34 — a former literature student who wrote her thesis on his work — is living at Castle Houellebecq, decorating the place, he said.
In a perfect world, I would have met him in Normandy, but Houellebecq was not open to that level of intrusion. Instead, he drank. He reached for a can of Perrier I’d been drinking out of, pouring it into his own glass. His speech slowed, his sentences beginning and tapering off, protracted pauses accompanied by semi-groans that eventually morphed into his next comprehensible syllable. It was a little like listening to Glenn Gould play piano, a sort of strange singing over the thing as it unfolds.
I told him, at a certain point, that my favorite last line of any contemporary novel comes in “The Map and the Territory.” Of his novels, it is the least engaged with politics and sex. Though the protagonist is also solitary, he is an artist whose work surveys our devolution and, ultimately, our reabsorption into the natural world that we so assiduously bring to ruin. That last line is somewhat lost in translation: “Le triomphe de la végétation est totale.” “The triumph of nature is absolute” would be a somewhat flat way of rendering the line in English.
“That’s interesting,” Houellebecq said, pulling hard on his Benson and Hedges. “I’m allowed,” he continued, “to ask questions?”
Of course, I told him.
“Le triomphe de la végétation … You find it sad, though, too?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Horrible.”
“But it’s reality.”
“Yes, but it’s bizarre, it’s not obvious,” he said. “It’s an experience that began when I was in high school. I would be inside, and every day we would go from inside to outside, and we would pass by the old buildings of the high school, and there was also the Cathédrale de Meaux, which is an old cathedral, and maybe they didn’t have much money, and the vegetation was very seriously attacking the stone. That seemed like a powerful thing. Strangely, it was a beautiful cathedral, but I didn’t find it so tragic. But I was young.” He paused, filling his glass with wine. “Anyway, there’s something crushing about it.”
Houellebecq had stipulated that we would speak for two hours each day and then go to dinner, and so we went to dinner. As he talked, he would trail off and then sleepily list to the left and, as his head lightly knocked the glass window-door of the restaurant, stir, returning to sit semi-upright, semi-awake. When it was, at last, over, he asked to meet earlier the next day, as if to acknowledge that were we to go too late again, he might have trouble remaining conscious.
When I arrived the following afternoon, I punched codes through three levels of security (street gate, building door, elevator), stood at his door and rang the bell. I waited, rang again, waited. Nothing. I knocked. Rang. Nothing. Texted. Emailed. Called. Nothing.
This went on for about 30 minutes before I left.
The writer who misbehaves and gets drunk is, of course, a cliché, and Houellebecq’s decades of press appearances make consistent note of his tendencies. And yet to be a participant in the grim theater of it arouses a feeling different from disappointment or disgust. Many of his books prepare us for protagonists who might behave as he does, but he was more touching than I was expecting. Treasured fairy tales, animal figurines: Here was a man who had clung to vestiges of innocence, kept them close. He says stupid things, offensive things, actionable things, but he has also managed to collect enough from the present to form something new, something that might outlive it.
The previous afternoon, when we talked about “The Map and the Territory,” in which painting is central, Houellebecq said he liked very much the work of Odilon Redon, a French Symbolist painter. I knew that the Musée d’Orsay had a fair number of his paintings, so I walked there thinking about that novel. At times the book feels like the work of a different author, one capable of imagining a human being who though solitary isn’t lonely, an artist who is capable of making something beautiful out of ugliness, not someone whose soul is being crushed by it.
The painter-protagonist, Jed Martin, rises to the top of the art world through three distinct phases in his career, plausible bodies of work that Houellebecq invents and vividly describes. Initially, he photographs Michelin maps. A suite of photorealistic, fake history paintings follows: “Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market,” “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology.” In a final phase, Martin turns to making abstract videos that begin with images of nature but that he layers using proprietary software until they become something else: a portrait of the artist as a man who, retreating alone into nature, documents it, warps it, arranges it, estranges it. Nature’s triumph is absolute.
At the Musée d’Orsay, I went to the rooms where the Redons were. The paintings I sought were five of the 15 vast canvases that Redon produced for a baron’s chateau. They teem with vegetation, only vegetation and sky, a huge wildness that has something Japanese about it but pushes into abstraction, a wood in which a witch granting wishes might plausibly be waiting.
“l am covering the walls of a dining room,” Redon said, “with flowers, flowers of dreams and fauna of the imagination.”
The next morning, Houellebecq called me and left a message. He was sorry he had fallen back asleep. Would I be able to come to speak with him that afternoon?
I arrived; we shared his bottle of white wine. His new novel, “Annihilation,” is his longest, he said, because it has so many characters: He needed to bring them through the path that he had set for them. “Annihilation” appeared in France two years ago, with a first printing of 300,000, which, proportionally, would be equivalent to 1.5 million copies in the United States — well beyond what even the most successful literary writer would ever see and unheard-of for any writer whose name has been mentioned for a Nobel Prize. In France, “Annihilation” received the expected split reception. The novel is not Houellebecq’s best — at moments, it’s his worst — but it is his most un-Houellebecqian in interesting ways: a family novel dressed up as a political thriller.
“Annihilation” is once again problematic, in that its protagonist is incontrovertibly racist and misogynistic, if passively so, the novel unfolding in the third person. The thoughts feel entirely plausible as thoughts belonging to Paul Raison (on the nose, the name, Saint Paul on the one hand and raison, reason, on the other). Paul is a graduate of one of the French grandes écoles — no real parallel for the idea in the United States, though most anyone in France’s ruling class went to one — now an adviser to the French financial minister, Bruno Juge, his last name a homonym for “judge” in French. (Bruno is also the name of the sex-addict brother in “The Elementary Particles,” and in “Annihilation” is perhaps a nod to Bruno Le Maire, the former finance minister in President Emmanuel Macron’s government, one of many such references that may be lost on an English-language reader, though Marine Le Pen should stand out.)
The novel is set, as many of Houellebecq’s are, in the future, in this case the immediate one, 2026 and 2027, in the run-up to the next French presidential election, a return to the imaginative terrain of “Submission.” Houellebecq is preoccupied by the state of the French state. After this summer — when the leftist coalition aligned, temporarily, with Macron’s center-right government to keep out the far right — France, he told me, had committed itself to permanent legislative gridlock and the beginning of the end of the Republic.
The specter of the far right’s seizing control of France animates both “Submission” and “Annihilation.” But whereas “Submission” imagined a France that makes a single fatal compromise, “Annihilation” keeps things on the brink, the novel more global in its doom spiral. The novel begins with a decapitation. Bruno is guillotined, albeit in a computer-generated video — a virtual version of the videos ISIS made of its real-life decapitations of Western hostages. The video is circulated widely across the internet. There’s a mystery as to who the cyberterrorists are — hard-left hackers? Eco-fascists? — and what their aims are, which only increases as other videos and real-life acts follow, including the sinking of a cargo ship, arson at the headquarters of a Danish sperm-bank company and general trade-disrupting chaos that threatens the global order.
All that chaos is mostly a MacGuffin. Though “Annihilation” hops from the point of view of one character to another, offering us portholes into their ways of seeing, Paul’s is the main consciousness on display. The story follows him from work to marriage to his nuclear family, who assemble to gather around Paul’s ailing father, Édouard, a former French intelligence agent who may or may not have knowledge of the source of the attacks.
The book is focally about Paul’s sexless marriage to Prudence (another name that’s on the nose), who also works in the French government, and Paul’s relationship to his two siblings, his brother, Aurélien, an art restorer, and his fervently Catholic sister, Cécile, one of Houellebecq’s few believably complex women, whose tenderness toward Paul and Aurélien allows a new gentleness and care to enter his work. The thriller plot of “Annihilation” ties us to Paul, forcing us to see and live as he does, in a world that, for a long time, is small and mean and then becomes something larger, truer, Paul more aware of the world’s brute facts — and of its beauty.
This is what Houellebecq, at his best, does: hook the reader with a portrait of a man’s limitations only to put him through a series of narrative paces that march him to an end — end of life, end of prospects, end of story — and elicit the compassion necessary to see him for more than his glaring shortcomings. In the final hundred pages of “Annihilation,” Paul falls grievously ill. The thriller thread evaporates, and the election thread dissolves. Paul’s own fate eclipses the wider world’s problems, as illness, at a private level, will.
As “Annihilation” wends its way deeper into its private losses, Paul and Prudence, once in love, lost in marriage, very like Ib and Christine lost in the woods and then lost in life, find their way back to each other, before the monstrous darkness approaches.
When I got back from Paris, I began writing what you’re reading. The second day ended with me and my daughter unpacking a box of books from my childhood that I had dug out of storage, to see if there were any she might like. On top of the box, of all the forgotten things, was this: my three-volume edition of Andersen’s stories, with its covers of gold, blue and green.
My daughter opened to the first story — the same first story in Houellebecq’s copy, “Ib and Little Christine” — read the first paragraph and then clutched the book to her chest. I wasn’t getting it back. Hers was the reaction that pretty much every writer on the planet would hope a reader would have.
This is not the reaction that I have reading Houellebecq. Not, for the most part, love; rather, recognition. His world is oddly our world, the one in which we are all heading for oblivion, all involved in the ugly trajectory that the human race has charted for itself, the disenchantment we all suffer and the enchantment that stories can bring us, when we are young.
Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for the magazine who teaches at Bard College. His last article was on the novelist Cormac McCarthy.
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