I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of portraying society) and plotting (the ends of the individual's story). What remained was character (subjective perceptions) and politics (the objective goal of social life). The vestiges of the Puritan personality disorder mean that character must always align with politics.
I exempt detective fiction and spy novels. These genres remain true to form and readership, so they retain a high degree of craft: plausible social detail, competent plotting, and coherent character motivation. Without these constraints, American literary fiction, which was world-class in the century between Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, has devolved into pious, slackly written slop, a cynical mixture of self-help, affirmative action, and movie pitches.
Exceptions are made for upmarket European novelists. They make American publishers look classy; the emptier American fiction becomes, the more snobbish it gets. Reactionary content in the form of social description is not a problem, either. Reaction is to European writers as hypocrisy is to Americans. When a European says the unsayable, he allows Americans to discuss the unmentionable. This must explain why Michel Houellebecq (pronounced "Welbeck") is published in English, and why Annihilation, his latest and possibly last novel, is, though frequently dull and afflicted by the incompetences of literary fiction, very much worth reading.
Anglophone critics still call Houellebecq, age 68 but wizened like a dwarf extra from The Lord of the Rings, an enfant terrible. This is oddly accurate, for his recurring subject is a society in its second childhood. That is the penultimate act of the human comedy, a prelude to the final fiasco, the dissolution of personality and bowel control. Socially, it is the prelude, Houellebecq reckons, to the dissolution of culture and border control, leading to societal collapse and cultural extinction. If you have visited France or any other Western European country lately, you will know what he means.
As with the human comedy, so with the social: Houellebecq's novels tend toward hilarious despair. The best—which is to say, the worst—are Atomized (1998) and Submission (2015), the former a pornographic account of a joyless hedonism which is at once boringly globalized and distinctively French, the latter a prediction of how the French way of life will shortly end when the Islamogauchiste alliance of the Left and Islamists comes to power and closes the sex dungeons.
Houellebecq's protagonists, always male and middle-aged, are not so much in second childhood as permanent adolescence. Epigrams and philosophical asides mingle with the ripe aroma of the male teenage bedroom. Recurrent Houellebecqian motifs include literary Décadence (Joris-Karl Huysmans), American schlock (H.P. Lovecraft), Buddhism, and fellatio. This is pretty much the fulfillment of Nietzsche's prediction that the post-Christian West would slide into nihilism, minus the fellatio.
Paul Raison, the gray vacuum at the center of Annihilation, has followed his father into the French security services. A specialist in digital counterterrorism, Paul also advises Bruno Juge, a technocratic politician whose devotion to the French republic leads him to ring-fence the French economy and sleep in his office while living on pizza like a postmodern monk.
Paul is in a childless and sexless relationship with Prudence, a tax official who, hoping to reconnect with her sexuality and Paul, frequents a Wiccan cult in her spare time. "What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn't make contact with one another any more, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allowed the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy?" Paul wonders.
Paul finds himself pulled in three directions. Professionally, he and his team are baffled by a series of terrorist attacks. The targets (a Chinese container ship, a Danish sperm bank, an Irish company working on human-computer brain interfaces) suggest an anti-technological bent, and are advertised on the internet with occult pictograms and pentagrams. Personally, Paul is recalled to his family roots in Beaujolais after his father suffers a near-fatal stroke. Politically, Paul joins Bruno's campaign for the 2027 presidency, in which Bruno runs in a paired candidacy with Benjamin Sarfati, an ex-TV journalist.
Paul's surname means "Reason," the soi-disant principle of the French Revolution and France's technocratic government. Benjamin Sarfati, a fast talker with little grasp of policy, resembles Éric Zemmour (Sarfati means "French" in Hebrew). Bruno seems to be based on Bruno Le Maire, Emmanuel Macron's minister for the economy from 2017 to this year. His fictional surname means "Judge." The emblematic names remind us that, just as one source of the novel was Christian allegory such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, so France's religious foundations are revealed as its cultural terrain erodes.
Paul followed his father's path into the security services. His younger brother Aurélien followed their late mother, a sculptress, and works for the state as a tapestry restorer. While the sons follow reason and art, their sister Cécile follows the third rail of religion. She becomes a fervent Catholic, marries a provincial notary named Hervé, and lives in Arras, once a medieval center of European tapestry-making, now noted for post-industrial blight and Marine Le Pen voters.
Provincial notaries are the foot soldiers of the 19th-century French novel: Emma Bovary is ruined by one. Hervé fulfills this function in its post-bourgeois mode. Even Paul must admit that, in a collapsing world, Hervé's youthful membership of identitarian nationalist groups, his vote for Marine Le Pen, and his comfortably worn Christian consolations are the rough and rawly exposed foundations of French civilization. The state no longer functions properly. Immigration and economic polarization have divided society. "You know," Hervé says, "networks and relationships are the only things still working."
This schematic architecture is strong enough to sustain a 19th-century "state-of-the-nation" novel as well as a 20th-century "novel of ideas." Annihilation is at its best as a novel of ideas, and often shambolic as a novel of family or national life. Perhaps this reflects its social subject. Bruno heroically struggles to reverse the loss of economic energy, but France is late into an entropic unraveling; the "circle of reason" that once kept the republic on the rails is broken. Prudence, inspired by Wicca, commits to life, too, donning the traditional Houellebecquian g-string and performing the essential Houellebecquian gestures of fellatio. But Paul is a man of procedures not commitments. The revival of his sex life is enough, and not enough:
Family and marriage: those were the last two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organized in the first half of the twenty-first century. Other solutions had been imagined, in vain, by people who had had the merit of seeing that the old solutions were worn out, even if they could not come up with new ones, and whose role in history had therefore been entirely negative.
The problem is the usual weakness of literary fiction: poor plot management. The terrorism plot withers as the family and political plots gather pace. The family plot comes alive when Hervé and Aurélien's lover, an immigrant nurse from West Africa, organize a team to bust Paul's father out of the hospital where the state has placed him, there to await his death. But the action runs into the sand once Paul's father is installed in the family home as a wheelchair-bound mute. The political plot is well observed but dull, and further dulled by Paul's lack of faith in politics:
The liberal doxa persisted in ignoring the problem, in the naïve belief that the lure of material gain could be substituted for any other human motivation, and could on its own supply the mental energy necessary for the maintenance of a complex social organization. This was quite plainly false, and it seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if one could not at present predict the date or the manner in which this might occur—but the date could be close, and the manner violent.
American readers may laugh at the idea of spooks and technocrats as the last buttress of a democratic republic, but this is France. Similarly, if Paul were English, it would not take him 4 decades and 400 pages for him to realize that the French Revolution was a bad idea. Then again, if Paul were English, the symbol of his revived sex life would be him, not Prudence, donning the g-string. But this is France, so "When in Rome…"
Virginia Woolf wrote that when Dickens was stuck for a plot, he kept the flames going by "throwing another handful of people on the fire." Houellebecq sidesteps the plot impasses and enlivens the tedium of naturalism in a gray age with his usual souvenirs of the old literary Décadence: suicide, incest, Buddhism. Like an old swinger who finds the Viagra no longer works, he even touches on France's greatest taboo, monarchism, the political equivalent of the Satanist's pentagrams and pictograms.
The Latin nihil (nothing) is at the heart of annihilation. The empty man at the center of Annihilation means nothing, prefers feeling nothing over feeling pain, and can think of nothing else beyond his own feelings. These include his social status. It would be vulgar and provincial to retreat into organic social life and Catholicism with Cécile and Hervé, so Paul is stuck. He perceives the materials of life, and the possibility of transcendence as more than sexual distraction, but is unable to commit himself with a whole heart. His inner vacancy does, however, allow him to perceive the entropic fate that politics cannot forestall:
There was also something else, a dark and secret force which might be psychological, sociological or simply biological in nature, it was impossible to know what it was, but it was terribly important because everything else depended upon it, both demographics and religious faith, and finally people's desire to stay alive, and the future of their civilizations. The concept of decadence might have been a difficult one to figure out, but it remained a powerful reality; and what was more, perhaps more importantly, politicians were incapable of influencing it.
Deviations and deviance done, a diagnosis of cancer forces Paul, who has made a middling job of living, to finally commit to life by making a better job of dying. This being a Houellebecq novel, he reads Agatha Christie novels while working his morphine pump with the other hand. Speechless after the removal of his tongue, he still manages spectacular erections.
"The final act is bloody, however beautiful the comedy of all the rest," Pascal wrote. "In the end, dirt is thrown on your head and that's it for ever." Paul dies as he has lived, anesthetically and aesthetically. His painkillers, Prudence's pop Buddhism and the morphine pump, allow him to dodge the worst of the blood. He is a Nietzschean "last man," a shrunken product of an age so stable and comfortable that the philosopher's ideal, making a good death, is democratically available to all, yet somehow meaningless to him. He also knows the age of Western man is dying with him, and he sees that it will be bloody. Après lui, le déluge.
"By chance, I have reached a positive conclusion: It's time for me to stop," Houellebecq writes in his afterword. It would be a pity if this was Houellebecq's last word. Annihilation is patchy and messy, and often hard-going and annoying, but it is harder to imagine any Anglophone writer coming close to its intellectual range. Houellebecq is in at the death. The novel of ideas may be interred with him.
Annihilation: A Novel
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pp., $30
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.