Annihilation: A Novel

France in the year 2027 is ravaged by a series of cyberattacks and deep fakes. With exceptional CGI, a fake video shows a member of the ministerial cabinet executed by guillotine. The nation experiences economic decline during a presidential election year. These events become a major issue for Paul Raison, an adviser to the finance minister. His wife, Prudence, works in the Treasury department. These events and personalities become the focus of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Annihilation.

Houellebecq can be associated with many French terms: enfant terrible, agent provocatuer, and bête noire. His status as a literary celebrity has turned every book release into an event. What will he say next? Who will he offend? Annihilation does provoke and offend and dazzle. Yet, at the same time, Houellebecq’s status as an award-winning novelist has revealed him to be none other than an éminence grise. This narrative is not about “shocking the squares” as much as shining a harsh light on the foibles and hypocrisies of rightists and leftists.

The political drama fades into the background when Paul learns his father, Édouard, has suffered a stroke. Édouard, like Paul, was a lifelong civil servant, specifically with the DGSI. The acronym stands for the General Directorate for Internal Security. During Paul’s life, his father was remote, secretive, and mysterious. His late mother was an art restorer. When Paul visits his father in the hospital, he sees his father’s female companion, along with his younger sister, a devout Catholic, and her husband, an unemployed notary.

Later in the novel Paul meets up with his younger brother, also an art restorer, his journalist wife, and their biracial son. These awkward family reunions become sites of repressed frustrations and internal aggression. Houellebecq laces Paul’s internal monologues with jagged bon mots, essayistic rants etched in battery acid and bile. They dissect the tiresome virtue signaling of leftist poseurs as much as they reveal the emptiness of Paul’s marital life. He is all but divorced from his wife. He tells himself that she is cheating on him, but even he doesn’t believe this fantasy he concocted for himself.

The Northern Irish translator Shaun Whiteside has rendered Annihilation in a tart British English. Characters drink from “tins of Coke” and pass lorries on the highway. He makes Houellebecq sound very much like Evelyn Waugh, if Waugh was a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, misanthropic civil servant.

Paul simultaneously detests and envies his sister’s zealous Catholicism. But this is a Catholicism that has attached itself, lamprey-like, to the venomous crypto-fascism of Marine LePen’s National Rally. Unfortunately, the leftist critiques come from Indy, his brother’s wife, an ugly shrewish woman who treats her husband like a doormat. In these scenes, Houellebecq comes dangerously close to a hack fraud like Ayn Rand. Rand, a middling writer best known for anarcho-capitalist agitprop like Atlas Shrugged, was fond of strawman characters. Houellebecq is a better writer than that. Exposing leftists as buffoonish hypocrites would be too easy. But he does find them good targets for a well-aimed bon mot.

Paul ruminates about Indy, his brother’s wife, having chosen “a black [sperm] donor? Probably the desire to assert her independent spirit, her non-conformity and her anti-racism at the same time. She had used her child as a kind of advertising billboard, a way of displaying the image she wanted to give of herself—warm, open, a citizen of the world—while he knew her to be rather selfish, greedy and above all conformist to the highest degree.” Her husband, Aurélien, comes across as an impotent sad sack and an overly sensitive artsy type. (A Fredo Corleone if one is charitable.)

While Paul’s meditations on contemporary life prove fascinating, he becomes very much a passive character. He almost disappears for lack of agency. Yet this might be the point. What is being annihilated in Annihilation? His father, unable to speak about his job to his family, now, following his coma, cannot speak at all. Medial personnel refer to his vegetative state. The situation becomes more complicated when it is insinuated that his father’s secret files might hold the key to unlocking whoever is behind the cyberattacks. Will Paul finally show some will power and seize those secret files for himself? Take control and take action. Or is the future of France bogged down in a miasma of masculine impotence and technological distraction?

Michel Houellebecq is a controversial writer. He can offend and to label him a misogynist or Islamophobe isn’t without merit. Yet without such writers to wake people up and boil the blood, the literary world would be a much more boring place. Ironically, he can be compared to Joyce Carol Oates. Like Oates, his work straddles horror and comedy. His critique of modern French life is dour, pessimistic, and cold. It’s no coincidence he wrote a book-length essay on racist misanthrope H. P. Lovecraft. At the same time, Annihilation is darkly comedic, its portraits of devout Catholics, strident leftists, and Gen Zers equally merciless.