Annihilation
By Michel Houellebecq
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 544 pages, $30
For the miserable loners who populate Michel Houellebecq’s novels, there is no refuge from the modern world’s awfulness—“no Israel,” as one of them says. Over three decades, the French novelist has tallied the grim costs of “l’extension du domaine de la lutte”—“the extension of the domain of the struggle”—his phrase for the unrelenting spread of economic liberalism and the infiltration of its pitiless logic into our love and sex lives.
Houellebecq’s knack for prescient social satire and penchant for misanthropy are undeniable, but his fiction can’t be reduced to its bleak sociological thesis. His more recent books also frequently meditate on religion as an answer to both existential quandaries and intractable problems of social organization. This is especially true of Submission (2015), a thoughtful, darkly humorous novel that combines a bait-and-switch conversion story with dystopian satire to suggest Islamic rule as a likely fate for decadent France.
Already in its title, the newly translated Annihilation, released in French in 2022, hints at outcomes still more dire. At once a political thriller and a family melodrama, the novel evokes the pathos of fragile human lives touched by unhoped-for happiness only to be crushed by despair and death. But it also suffers from a curious lack of vibrancy and dramatic tension, shortcomings that at least one reviewer has chalked up to careless editing, but that can more plausibly be ascribed to its reliance on New Age spirituality to animate its sweeping narrative. Whereas in Submission, the main character’s spiritual journey meshes with wider social concerns in a way that both thwarts and meets the reader’s expectations, the latest book’s religious energies end up being both too diffuse and too esoteric to bridge the personal and the public.
The novel’s opening pages see members of the French intelligence services trying to make sense of a series of ominous internet videos. One shows the sinking of a container ship whose surviving crew members later confirm that their vessel was torpedoed, presumably by terrorists. Paul Raison, a high functionary in the ministry of finance and the novel’s protagonist, does what he can to assist the General Directorate for Internal Security in thwarting further attacks; yet he reflects: “The worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.” Welcome to Houellebecq’s France, where even technocrats educated at the top management school to pilot the economy want the system to burn.
In fact, Paul isn’t half so miserable as a typical Houellebecq protagonist. But despite his role as confidant to the powerful French finance minister, Bruno Juge, he is lonely and unfulfilled, his relationship with his wife, Prudence, so tenuous that they go for months without crossing paths. The couple’s malaise is of the variety that often shadows successful middle-class people with prestigious diplomas. It dates to their joint purchase of a luxury apartment on the Rue Lheureux. “The coincidence was not accidental,” the narrator reflects, as “an improvement in living conditions often goes hand-in-hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.”
As a maxim about the problem of arrival, this rings completely true. But more than just a predictable pattern of desire, Houellebecq wants us to see the insidious effects of a specific worldview. The ideology of infinite choice can’t make good on its promises. Programmed to consume, Paul and Prudence believed that owning a “sumptuous duplex” would bring them happiness. Instead, they ended up second-guessing the meaning of their lives, and even their love for each other.
Set in the near future, Annihilation is Houellebecq’s longest novel and his most stylistically relaxed, its run-on, comma-linked clauses drifting along with Paul’s musings. Sadly, the cat-and-mouse game between French intelligence and the terrorists ends up feeling less thrilling than it should, maybe because Houellebecq can’t figure out which side he wants to win; reams of information-dump dialogue about anarcho-primitivism don’t exactly set the pulse racing either. But I found myself turning the pages anyway, contentedly floating in a stream of random, digressive commentary on everything from Russian 4 x 4s to Romanesque churches. Grotesque thumbnail sketches of incidental characters also won me over. A château caretaker, for instance, looks “rather like those malign valets, more or less degenerate, who take part in black-magic ceremonies involving the strangling of chickens and the drawing of cabalistic signs on the floor of the barn, and whom you encounter in fantastical Z-list films.”
“The novel’s core love story is both affecting and original.”
The novel’s core love story is both affecting and original. In defiance of almost every literary precedent, it finds eros and passion not in Bovaryesque transgression, but in the rediscovery of matrimonial bliss. Nearing fifty, Paul and Prudence live in a state of “total nutritional warfare.” Prudence once took pride in buying her husband his favorite foods. But she has long since opted for veganism, and seaweed and soybean sprouts invade their refrigerator, driving out Paul’s meats and cheeses. The spouses sleep in separate bedrooms; they have gone 10 years without having sex.
But then, the “female principle” within her awakened by Wiccan goddess worship, Prudence rekindles her affection for Paul, who timidly reciprocates her overtures. By mid-novel, she has gone so far as to buy him two slices of pâté en croûte, a step that can’t fail to bring about a resumption of marital intimacy.
One frighteningly vindictive character aside, Annihilation’s cast tends to act from well-meaning motives. After Paul’s elderly father has a stroke, the Raison family joins forces with underground activists to spring him from a sinister public nursing home. In a society that “has a problem with old age,” the rescue operation feels like an act of resistance.
Later, when her husband’s firm goes bankrupt, Paul’s devoutly Catholic sister Cécile takes on work as a freelance chef. She leaves a trying first job on the verge of tears, but quickly masters herself so that she can reassure her unemployed spouse that the night went “very well.” It’s a small but meaningful gesture of selflessness, rivaled only by Prudence’s sexual generosity to her husband in the novel’s devastating latter sections.
It would be just like Houellebecq to present us with these good-hearted, vulnerable characters and inseparable couples the better to proclaim the absurdity and wrenching finitude of human life, the certainty that even the most beautiful romances will eventually be reduced to ashes. And traces of the author’s signature in-your-face nihilism do filter through. But on a deeper level, Houellebecq seems to be confronting the Raison family with death mostly so that he can show us their love for one another—and their dependence on religious belief for, if not happiness, at least consolation.
The French novelist hasn’t converted to Catholicism, as far as I know, although in The Map and the Territory (2010), his fictional double has himself secretly baptized. But whatever his personal convictions or lack thereof, Houellebecq is too honest a writer not to acknowledge that organized religion is the cure par excellence for what ails the modern West. Submission takes perverse delight in recognizing that Islamic polygamy solves the problem of “the extension of the domain of the struggle.” And the remorseful ending of Serotonin (2019) makes the case for Christianity as an antidote to “illusions of individual liberty.”
Annihilation offers an unconvincing neopagan variation on this important claim. Although Paul, a self-described agnostic, twice offers candles to the Virgin in the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité in Bercy, the novel’s animating spirituality is Prudence’s Wicca, especially her belief in reincarnation. Wicca both informs her sexual life with Paul and, Houellebecq insists, helps her to deal with life’s most serious issues, above all death. There are also strong hints that the New Age faith has other adherents at the highest levels of the French administrative state, and even that Wicca, or at least its symbology, may be informing the terrorists.
These enticing possibilities never get fully worked out, however, and that may be just as well. The problem is not only that Wicca, a decentralized, remixed faith with no official doctrine, is an insufficiently robust answer to the weighty questions this novel raises. It’s also that its precepts—life as suffering, time as cyclic, the world as illusion—are in tension with the incarnational anthropology of the European novel. Houellebecq tries to make Balzacian realism the vehicle for a samsaric journey beyond appearances to “timeless fusion with the soul of the world.” What he ends up with is a book that feels truly impressive in its scope and humanity yet also strangely tranquil, almost sedated, as if it was written in the lotus position.
The other main reason for the low energy is Paul himself, who is highly competent and sensitive yet still seems miscast as a novelistic hero. He ensures a kind of artistic unity, welding political intrigues to domestic storylines by his mere presence, like the human equivalent of the overlapping section in a Venn diagram. But though he intervenes on occasion, he is mostly just a passive if sympathetic witness to events, even when his own life is at stake.
For all its unmitigated spleen and depressing plots points, Houellebecq’s previous novel, Serotonin, insists that its love stories might have turned out differently, that the main character, Labrouste, could have made the women in his life happy if he had ordered his life according to Christian teachings instead of conforming to the diktats of sexual liberalism. It offers glimpses of a luminous truth not despite but on account of its darkness, which constitutes a kind of via negativa, implying the existence of a real yet unchosen path to fulfillment.
With its quiescent protagonist and preference for “good feelings,” Annihilation fails to create the conditions necessary for such an approach. Flirting with determinism, the novel suggests that Paul never possessed enough agency to act otherwise than he did, and presents his tender, infinitely sad relationship with Prudence as the one great stroke of luck in his otherwise meaningless life. And so it ends up being perhaps the bleakest of all Houellebecq novels, precisely because there is no tragic chiaroscuro, no implied contrast between what happens in reality and the better life that might have been.