Has Houellebecq Found a Happy Ending?

Annihilation: A Novel
by michel houellebecq
translated by shaun whiteside
farrar, straus and giroux, 540 pages, $30

In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, Michel Houellebecq explained that he was not a “reactionary,” since he believes it is impossible to resist social change. “You can only observe and describe,” Houellebecq said. “I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values . . . that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.”

At other times, Houellebecq has sounded less detached. “When a country—a society, a civilisation—gets to the point of legalising euthanasia,” he argued in Le Figaro in 2021, “it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else—another country, another society, another civilisation—might have a chance to arise.” And in his Harper’s article “The European Way to Die” (2023), he contended that “to cut short” a man’s “death throes,” that kairos of final reconciliations and farewells, “is both impious (for those who believe) and immoral (for anyone).”

Houellebecq’s new novel Annihilation, originally published in French in 2022, can be read either as a ruthlessly exacting description of liberalism’s effects or as an artful protest against them. But Houellebecq’s commitments are clear: Here is his horrified diagnosis of a culture of death that is euthanistic in more than one sense. 

Paul Raison, the protagonist, is a French civil servant whose estranged father, retired state intelligence sleuth Édouard, is felled but not killed by a sudden stroke. Now Paul must decide whether to rally for the hard work of reconciliation or to cede his father to a state-sponsored “happy death.” 

Sitting in the hospice beside his frozen, silenced father, Paul is given to confession. He mourns the contraceptive mentality that kept him from having children: “[I]t 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 it was completely unexpected, he had always been sure of the opposite.” 

The indignities of an impersonal hospital jolt his jaded soul in another way: Confronted by the grim suffering within the ward (a confused, unattended resident passes by him, “completely naked apart from a soiled nappy, with shit dripping down her right leg”), he literally runs in the other direction. But over the course of the novel, the ancient virtue of filial piety makes a comeback; and in one of contemporary fiction’s most metaphysically thrilling heists, Paul and his family cooperate with an illegal anti-euthanasia entity to steal his father from the hospice.

For Houellebecq, resistance to state suicide need not be religious. (He has described himself as agnostic.) The man who runs the heist is not a Baptist like the underground entity’s founder but an unbeliever who fears the Western world is heading for “self-destruction” through its treatment of the elderly. “The real reason for euthanasia, in fact,” he says, “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.” By sentimentalizing dignity and detaching it from any measure of merit or honor, we “deprive life of all motivation and meaning; very precisely, this is what may be called nihilism. Devaluing the past and the present in favor of times to come, devaluing the real and preferring a virtual reality located in a vague future . . .”

Meanwhile, we learn that Paul’s father had been tracking another kind of illegal organization before his stroke: a terrorist cell whose identity can only be guessed at from its targets. It attacks a Chinese container carrier (are the terrorists anti-capitalist campaigners?); a sperm bank (traditional Catholics?); and a boat of five hundred refugees heading from Africa to Europe, all of whom are killed. The attacks, when mapped, make the shape of a pentagram, a Satanic symbol. The men running the intelligence investigation struggle to interpret it; they have “no room” for “the demonic” or assume that both Satanists and Catholics are “in the same general ballpark.” But the reader need not be so blind to the spiritual threats Houellebecq more than hints at.

Crucially, Paul’s wife, Prudence, an Official of the Treasury, reveals that the pentagram is also used by Wiccans. Herself a practitioner of New Age spirituality, she says that many of the “civil servants who were steering the economy” are Wiccans, suggesting a link between the deep state and the terrorists. The novel does not pursue the connection further, but the implication is that terrorists and modern-day bureaucrats share a mutual desire for annihilating civilization as we know it. In a misanthropic mood, Paul himself concedes that “he couldn’t entirely blame them.”

Religion and spirituality are important features in Houellebecq’s novels. Paul tries to pick up some pious practices, crossing himself hastily as he lights two candles before the Virgin Mary. Yet it isn’t Catholicism—France’s religious core—that takes center stage toward the end of the novel, but Prudence’s neopagan spirituality. When death comes for Paul in the form of fatal mouth cancer that demands removal of the tongue, he finds comfort not in the promise of resurrection but in reincarnation. As he and Prudence become lovers after a decade’s hiatus, and his life alternates between sex at the door of death and a rather laconic spiritual quest, he shifts from tolerating Prudence’s beliefs insofar as they are therapeutic to sympathetically absorbing them. In the last pages, he pines for some final cycle of “samsaric existence to pass to the other shore, that of illumination, of timeless fusion with the soul of the world, of nirvana.” 

For Houellebecq, this seems to be a “happy death,” as he announces in the acknowledgements that Annihilation is his final novel: “By chance I have reached a positive conclusion; it’s time for me to stop.” Yet, though Houellebecq’s final novel contains many ruthlessly penetrating insights, how can this be a “positive conclusion” when what Paul longs for is, essentially, nonbeing? Joseph Ratzinger’s sharp take on New Age beliefs, Buddhism, and relativism is here apropos. The “way of enlightenment is the way out of the thirst for being into what seems to us to be nonbeing, Nirvana,” he writes in Truth and Tolerance. “That means in the world itself there is no truth. Truth comes by leaving the world.” Salvation comes through “the annihilation of existence and of the person of the individual.” Paul’s promising opposition to the culture of death, by saving his father from the hospice, ultimately gives way to a soulful accommodation with annihilation. Paul’s father, his wider family, and the fate of France all fall off the novel’s map as he takes refuge in self-immolation. Houellebecq’s best efforts at a tender uplift open out into a kind of void.

Joshua Hren is founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by John William Waterhouse, from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.