Missing divine madness | Review of Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's latest work, Annihilation, explores family dynamics and societal critiques with his signature narrative perversions.

Michel Houellebecq, considered as a career, is a curious case. He’s not an arthouse orchid, living solely off a meagre but steady diet of literary awards. In fact, the awards are relatively few and he actually makes money from his novels. On the other hand, Houellebecq isn’t merely one of those commercial successes, well-known enough to be sold on the streets of postcolonial nations. He is despised among the righteous — at least outside of France — for his alleged racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia. Yet, Houellebecq got his Paris Review interview, the industry’s equivalent of the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

All this is perhaps irrelevant for considering his latest work, Annihilation, translated from the French orginal Anéantir (2022) by Shaun Whiteside. The 500-page novel has two storylines. In one, a technically-savvy group of mysterious terrorists stages perfect attacks, some symbolic, on the instruments of global capitalism. This plot could be removed entirely.

The other storyline has to do with Paul Raison, a high-level apparatchik in the French Ministry of Finance. His father, Édouard, once a respected spy, is now retired and living a contented life with his partner Madeleine. Paul has a younger sister, the deeply religious Cécile, and a much younger brother Aurélien. The siblings aren’t estranged and share a love for their father, but they are not close. Of the three siblings, only Cécile is happily married; Paul’s marriage is a hibernating tardigrade, an organism of routines and rigid house-sharing rules. His wife Prudence is also a government functionary, and since this is a Houellebecqian novel, a Wiccan convert. Aurélien’s wife seems to be a composite of all the female literary critics and journalists who have ever annoyed Houellebecq.

Edouard suffers a debilitating stroke, and Madeline, his children and their partners have to deal with the fallout. As with Braess’ traffic paradox, in which the removal of a road can sometimes improve traffic conditions, so it is with the removal of a strong parent from the children’s lives. The affective logjams between the siblings start to clear. Paul is launched on a trajectory towards rediscovering life’s real meaning; namely, cuddling at night with someone you love.

There isn’t much of a plot. This author has always been better at narrative perversions such as irrelevant quips, rants, and info-dumps, than at making conflicts, cliffhangers and other embarrassing inducements for the more dimwitted reader. So we learn, for example, that a good smoke is the only thing that can match the gravity of a hospital situation; and that job-centre advisors must have taken clowning workshops because “the psychological treatment of the unemployed had got much better over the last few years”; and so on.

Houellebecq’s style has similarities with those of Poe, Marguerite Duras, Fleur Jaeggy, Robertson Davies and other novelists of the Balzacian persuasion. But unlike them, he is flippant and self-indulgent, and his novels, including Annihilation, suffer on that account. He has a sense of chaos and evil that contemporary literature badly needs, but his sentimentality prevents him from achieving the tragic grandeur signature to such efforts. A certain divine madness is missing. I didn’t regret reading this novel one bit. However, I have no desire to read it again.

The reviewer is an author, most recently of The Coincidence Plot.