
You should always be skeptical when writers announce that they are finished writing. In 2011, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård closed his six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical novel My Struggle by celebrating that he was “finally finished” and by “revel[ing] in, truly revel[ing] in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.” He went on to publish more than a dozen books in as many years. The French writer Michel Houellebecq—of whom Knausgård wrote in 2015, “One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work”—concluded the acknowledgments section of his 2022 novel Anéantir, now available in English as Annihilation, with a line that was widely reported to mean he was capping his pen: “By chance I have reached a positive conclusion; it’s time for me to stop.” But this announcement, too, may have been premature; he published a short memoir the following year.
In the memoir, Quelques mois dans ma vie (“A Few Months in My Life”), not yet available in English, Houellebecq admits that writing Anéantir did not have the purgative “effect of an exorcism.” But the true purpose of his swift return to the page was to defend his public image amid two recent controversies. In the first controversy, nine months after the publication of Anéantir, Houellebecq gave an interview to the French publication Front Populaire in which he predicted “reverse Bataclan” attacks on Muslims in France (the Bataclan theater was one of the sites of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks claimed by ISIL), prompting the Grand Mosque of Paris to threaten him with a lawsuit. In the second, a few months later, Houellebecq filed a lawsuit of his own against the Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics) to prevent the release of a pornographic film in which he starred with his wife and two of the collective’s members (nicknamed “The Hen” and “The Sow” in the memoir).
The public response to these two controversies could hardly have been surprising to Houellebecq, who, at almost seventy, has yet to outgrow his status as French literature’s enfant terrible. But Houellebecq was unwilling to cede the final word to his critics. Many would like the last judgment of Houellebecq to be that he is a reactionary, a misogynist, an Islamophobe (“Yes, probably,” he conceded to the third charge in an interview promoting his 2015 novel Submission). But something that Houellebecq is not, despite consistent accusations to the contrary, is a nihilist. He is, rather, a stern moralist, even if he and his protagonists do not always live up to his inconsistent, idiosyncratic code of ethics. In his supposedly final novel, Annihilation, Houellebecq submits his cast of characters to the apocalyptic trials of a remarkably harsh and vengeful creator.
Houellebecq’s protagonists are typically depressed, white-collar, middle-aged Frenchmen, and Annihilation’s Paul Raison is no exception. He serves as senior advisor to France’s minister of economy and finance, Bruno Juge, based on the real-world former minister (and friend of Houellebecq) Bruno Le Maire. It’s the run-up to the 2027 presidential election in France, and, amid speculation that Bruno will throw his hat in the ring, an AI-generated video of his beheading is spread as a virus across government servers. In the video, Bruno’s executioners are not Islamists but men dressed in the black penitential robes and capirotes of flagellants sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition; incongruously, they wield a guillotine. The video is so lifelike that even France’s domestic intelligence agency, where Paul’s retired father Édouard worked for forty years, has to check that Bruno is, in fact, still alive and well.
Édouard himself, on the other hand, is not well; he has suffered a stroke and is paralyzed. Paul and his two siblings, Cécile, a conservative Catholic, and Aurélien, who, like their deceased mother before him, restores medieval and Christian art, visit their bedridden father in a public nursing home. The home is woefully understaffed—when Paul first visits, he sees an unattended resident walk down a corridor “completely naked apart from a soiled nappy, with shit dripping down her right leg.” But Édouard’s partner Madeleine is forbidden from taking care of him—bathing him, helping him use the bathroom, even pushing his wheelchair—due to her lack of nursing qualifications. Soon, Édouard’s family becomes convinced that the home’s neglect is accelerating his death—actively “kill[ing] him.” Édouard is unable to communicate, much less consent to leave the facility, so his family hatches a plot to kidnap him so Madeleine can take care of him at home.
If this sounds a bit extreme for a well-heeled family named “Reason,” things only get more incredible from here. Still, Houellebecq’s description of the horror of the nursing home is sufficiently sensationalistic to blackmail the reader into suspending disbelief and supporting the heist. Through Cécile’s husband, Hervé, a fellow traveler of the identitarian right, the Raisons enlist the Belgian arm of an American Baptist anti-euthanasia group to carry out the plot. This group is not only opposed to euthanasia, or even poor quality of care in nursing homes, but nursing homes in general. As the organizer of the operation, Brian—bizarrely not a Baptist, but a Nietzsche-quoting atheist—opines, “The real reason for euthanasia, in fact, is that we can no longer stand old people, we don’t even want to know that they exist, and that’s why we park them away in specialized places away from the eyes of other human beings.” Perhaps projecting Houellebecq’s own anxieties regarding his advancing age and the treatment of the elderly, Brian continues:
By granting greater value to the life of a child...we deny all value to our real actions. Our deeds, whether heroic or generous, all the things we have managed to accomplish, the things we have made, our works, none of that has the slightest worth in the eyes of the world any longer—and, very soon, even in our own eyes. We thus deprive life of all motivation and meaning; very precisely, this is what may be called nihilism.
This plotline will not come as a surprise to those who have followed Houellebecq’s recent writings. In a 2023 article for Harper’s, Houellebecq made an impassioned case against euthanasia and assisted suicide, echoing many of Brian’s statements in the novel. In the article, Houellebecq identifies as agnostic, but invokes the Last Judgment and the possibility of atonement or reconciliation on one’s deathbed as an argument against euthanasia. “Whether you believe in the existence of a creator who will call you to account or not,” he writes, “this is the moment of farewell—a last chance to see certain people, to tell them what you may never have said before, and to hear what they may have to say to you.” Far from a nihilist, Houellebecq reveals himself to be a harsh judge: “To cut short these death throes is both impious (for those who believe) and immoral (for anyone).”
Though Édouard is unable to tell his family what he has never said before, Paul does exactly that, confessing to his father at his bedside. He regrets not having had children, he says, surprising himself: “It was a real shock when he heard those words coming out of his mouth, because it was something he had never said to himself, and what was more...he had always been sure of the opposite.” Unlike most of Houellebecq’s previous protagonists, Paul is married, though he and his wife, Prudence, also a senior civil servant, live practically separate lives. They share an apartment but eat and sleep at different hours in different rooms, and have not had sex in more than a decade. Seeing Madeleine’s angelic devotion to his father, Paul sets out to mend his relationship with Prudence and fulfill his “marital duty.” These scenes of confession and caretaking are presented in earnest and show Houellebecq apparently developing a late appreciation for family and marriage.
Meanwhile—and rather in the background of these domestic dramas—the threat of a cryptic cyber-attack from the beginning of the novel turns increasingly real. First, a Chinese cargo ship is sunk off the coast of Portugal; then, a sperm bank is immolated in Denmark; later, the same fate befalls a neurotechnology laboratory in Ireland; finally, an African migrant boat is sunk off the coast of Spain, killing five hundred people. Who is responsible for these seemingly scattershot attacks? Anticapitalists? Antinatalists? Antiscientists? Antiglobalists? With the help of Édouard’s old files, dug up by Paul, the French intelligence agencies discover a link that suggests the real culprits might, improbably, be Satanists. When plotted on a map of Europe, the coordinates of the attacks form four points of an inverted pentagram. This insight enables the intelligence agencies to foil a fifth attack at a technology conference in Croatia.
From the Islamists of his earlier novels, Houellebecq’s concern seems to have shifted to devil worship. (Knausgård, curiously, has followed a similar progression away from his specific study of Hitler in My Struggle and toward a more abstract preoccupation with the devil in his ongoing The Morning Star series.) After four hundred pages of far-flung allusions to disparate political movements, this revelation is anticlimactic and scarcely believable.
At first blush, Houellebecq appears to be portraying these attacks as a product of cartoonish evil. But whom does Houellebecq really want to condemn here? The novel’s central figure and apparent conscience, Paul, offers us an indication: “If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it,” he reflects, “to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.” This position brings to mind not nihilism but the statements of certain American Baptists who suggested the September 11 attacks were the just punishment of a vengeful God on an immoral populace.
A role reversal in Annihilation’s denouement suggests Houellebecq’s protagonist is not subject to the same strict moral code and harsh judgment as the rest of his characters. Paul is diagnosed with mouth cancer and refuses to undergo surgery to remove the tumor, effectively choosing to accelerate his death rather than cut out his tongue and place himself in the same position as his father. These final hundred pages are the best of the novel, precisely because they challenge Houellebecq’s moralism and treat Paul’s suffering with compassion (perhaps too much compassion, as when Prudence is mobilized to perform a “dreamy” three-hour act of devotional fellatio). The “atheist, or rather agnostic” Paul pays a final visit to his local Catholic church and has “a sense of something unfinished in his life with that church—and perhaps with Christianity in general.”
In Quelques mois dans ma vie, Houellebecq reveals that one of the “main wellsprings” he drew from when writing Annihilation was not his concern over European politics, AI, or terrorism, but rather his own fear of contracting mouth cancer (whether he has, in fact, contracted it is left unclear). This fear, if we’re being sympathetic toward Houellebecq, may explain why the civilizational threats portrayed in the novel are totalized and abstracted to an almost apocalyptic and metaphysical level. For the terminally ill, the looming end of the material world tends to recontextualize day-to-day concerns. Houellebecq, however, tests readers’ patience and shows both a stunning lack of self-awareness and an inexhaustible capacity for self-pity when he goes on to locate the blame for his fear of mouth cancer on a sexually transmitted disease that one of KIRAC’s members may or may not have given him—never mind his half-century of chain smoking.
Still, let us not give in to the Houellebecqian temptation to pass last and damning judgment on his character. Even if he dismisses what his critics have to say to him, let us hope that Houellebecq still has the time and the will to tell us what he has never told us before.
Annihilation
Michel Houellebecq
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$30 | 544 pp.