Dear Prudence, Open Up Your Eyes
Houellebecq's Wonderful Lies
A novel of our time goes about our lives in the face of ambient doom. New York is on drought watch; it’s been weeks since it last rained, abnormally warm for mid-November; the leaves disintegrate rather than rot, and the wind kicks up violent dust storms in the streets. These are strange days, against which a new book blurs under orange autumn light of the fading year. You are ready to curl up in bed and forget it all, so naturally you pick up Annihilation. If it’s truth and beauty you’re after, you’ll have it in Houellebecq: the ugly mundane truth of suffering, and fatal beauty.
Therein, you will find as usual: dissolution of and disillusionment with the “West” (some amorphous amalgam of unfettered capitalism, liberal democratic state status quo, and vestigial enlightenment values of which France is the locus), amoral ambivalence, society-wide dysthymia, boundlessly hollow consumerism, the tourist industry, culinary arts, tech, smoke, booze, sex, terror, existential crises, systemic catastrophe, and a perpetually hellish cycling through excess, inertia, decay. These are many of the familiar matrices built into Michel Houellebecq’s Eurocentric dystopian-realist model of the modern world. What we don’t hope to find in the fiction of this most vociferous atheist—though now he would lead us to accept that it was always there in some capacity, however stepped-on—is an ardent belief in the power of love. Insatiable compassion, no. But Annihilation does aim at some last-ditch lingering trace of Romanticism in an all-too-contemporary near future, which it touches, and then lets go. If we are to believe the author’s postscript acknowledgement, this latest novel is to be his finale; in the true spirit of Rimbaud, the sexagenarian enfant terrible is now retired. I remain doubtful, at least until after he dies.
The novel concerns the fate of an aging bourgeois French nuclear family, the Raisons, after the elder patriarch suffers an aneurysm during the election year 2027, and is rendered paralyzed and mute; it then follows the precipitous fall of the eldest son and protagonist, Paul, who rapidly succumbs to a brief battle with mouth cancer.
In a novel robust with conspicuous cliché, names are cheekily considered: Paul is married to Prudence, the irony of which is not lost on him, yet he cannot recall his own father ever listening to The Beatles, nor does he suspect that he was named after Saint Paul. Here, we immediately see that Houellebecq has strayed from his typical domain; this is a novel not of placid post-68 France—though it is still that in a way, haunted by Édouard the stricken boomer’s blinking silence—but about a later generation, born of the abnormal naming craze, those who entered adulthood along with the internet; people whom, Prudence suggests tearily with a kiss at Paul’s sickbed, “weren’t really made for living.” Not cut out for life, lucky to find love, powerless to change things—smiling through it all. Gen X: or, generation annihilation, the first not to exist in any meaningful solidarity unless in youth as targeted marketing demographic, a blip on the MTV ratings.
Paul reminisces more than he lives. Returning to his childhood bedroom, he encounters on the wall there a poster of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, sending him on a Y2K-Proustian digressive revery that puts forth a lengthy critical reclamation of the second and third installments of the trilogy.
Many people had gone on to think that the first episode in the Matrix trilogy was the only really interesting one, with its innovations in terms of visual effects, and that the ones that followed were a bit stale. Paul didn’t share this point of view, which in his mind did not take sufficient account of the construction of the screenplay. In most trilogies, whether The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings, there’s a waning of interest in the second part, but a resumption of dramatic intensity in the third, even an apotheosis in the case of The Return of the King; and in the case of The Matrix Revolutions, the love story between Trinity and Neo, at first a little incongruous in a film for nerds, ended up by becoming genuinely overwhelming, to a large degree thanks to the performances of the actors, or at least that was what he had thought at the time, and what he still thought the next day when he woke up, this 25th December morning, almost twenty-five years later. (p. 107-108)
Among online cinephile circles today, one will inevitably find an especially enthusiastic cohort devoted toward appreciatively re-evaluating the Matrix series in its totality, which is now a quartet; this after the Wachowski sisters revealed that the film may be textually interpreted as an allegory of transgender experience, which in retrospect seems abundantly apparent. Paul does not mention the coda-like fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), so it may be assumed that Houellebecq himself was unaware of it at the time of writing, likely in the years closely preceding its announcement and release; in any event, it makes perfect sense that the film would fail to register as an object of attention in Paul’s limited scope, entrenched as he is not quite in the past, but in a befuddled middle age long bereft of adolescent interests. He is startled thus to realize—apparently for the first time, after being married for nearly twenty years—that Prudence in fact bears a striking resemblance to Carrie-Anne Moss. Sadly, Paul also remembers that things didn’t end very well for Neo in the Revolutions, not knowing that in our world Neo lives to love again; that he and Trinity will choose in the end to stay in the matrix, rather than escaping. And Paul, too, will make the choice to stay in his world by rejecting euthanasia.
Also on Paul’s teenage bedroom wall: a poster of Kurt Cobain. He has not listened to Nirvana for quite some time, and hardly listens to music at all now, save for the occasional Gregorian chanting—which makes me think of Houellebecq’s own penchant for monophony; indeed, he seems slightly out of step in Annihilation’s deliberately more polyphonic or systems-based narrative, and often retreats from it into interior monologue—meanwhile, Paul suspects that his sister Cécile, a devout Catholic, still listens to Radiohead occasionally.
There were only two years between them, but that might have been enough to explain the difference, things still moved quite quickly in those days, much less quickly than in the 1960s, of course, or even in the 1970s, the deceleration and immobilization of the West, heralding its annihilation, had been progressive.
(p. 109-110)
Naturally, Cécile’s husband Hévre’s similar teenage passion for The Lord of the Rings trilogy went naively hand in hand with his far right militancy at the time; now an unemployed former notary, he too has long since mellowed out and become virtually apolitical (or more quietly fascist). Glaringly, the pop cultural interests and music taste of the youngest brother Aurélien, a full ten years younger than Paul and thus of a different generation—fully a millennial—are entirely unknown and of absolutely no concern to Paul.
Such casually quasi-essayistic cultural asides are frequent in Houellebecq’s fiction. Each of his protagonists penetrates or skims a different sphere of knowledge, never very deeply: Serotonin’s agribusiness economics, Submission’s literary studies of the Decadent movement, the contemporary art world psychogeography of The Map and the Territory, etc. It’s an approach not unlike the occupational metaphor employed in the films of Paul Schrader, another auteur of alienation and the atomized man. In Annihilation, however, Houellebecq returns to something more akin to the everyman computer programmer from his 1994 debut novel, Whatever, though a fair bit further along in life and much closer in proximity to the upper class. In an existentialist inversion, instead of presenting an intellectual area of expertise accessed by the character’s mind, the technical field is here externally applied to the protagonist’s body: Paul is subjected to the field of medical science. Thanking several doctors in his acknowledgment, Houellebecq offers a word of advice in his penultimate sentence, “Essentially, French writers should be less reluctant to gather information; many people love their work, and enjoy explaining it to the uninitiated.” This remark begs the question, does Houellebecq love his work? If so, why quit?
Paul serves as close advisor to finance minister and liberal vice-presidential candidate Bruno Fuge, who is in every respect Paul’s superior. Bruno occupies a substantial portion of Paul’s mind, and looms over the novel as its driving intellectual force. Sometimes, subconsciously or not, Paul will think to himself: what would Bruno do in this situation? How would Bruno behave to demonstrate decorum? A powerful orator, diligent reader, and student of history, Bruno spontaneously declaims Corneille and Musset, derides Rousseau as “the last idiot and the worst bastard,” and forlornly praises the exceptionalism of the Boomers; he has a casual tendency toward freewheeling topical lecture that somehow never comes across as stifling, which Paul is endlessly enraptured with (until finally he isn’t). One gathers that Paul made it in his career as Bruno’s confidant because he is such a good ear, if not such a great interlocutor or thinker.
Poor Paul flounders at nearly every attempt to summon the powers of his own intellect, constantly attempting to draw from his only exposure to philosophy: a mere few months of general study during his senior year of high school. Funnily enough, the two names he does remember again and again, though never who said what or where exactly, are Pascal and Epicurus. No, Paul’s reference points are primarily pop (or midwit, if you like). He boils down to being the bearer of such unique opinions as that The Matrix Revolutions is the best film in the original trilogy. In the hospital, he observes earnestly, “Standing in the middle of the room was a huge apparatus, made of the same creamy white metal as the PET scanner, and which, like it, looked like something straight out of Star Wars.” (p. 471) This clunky pretense of clichéd normalcy is a salve. I am having normal thoughts, he thinks. It is normal to get sick and die.
As his cancer treatment progresses, Paul gets engrossed in the mystery novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Miraculously, this reading sustains his attention and does offer some semblance of solace; his renewed attempts to dally with philosophy do not. Strangely absent, then, throughout Annihilation is any prolonged sense of agony. Morphine and alcohol sufficiently alleviate Paul’s physical pain, while the persistence of divertissement and his wife’s companionship annul his psychological suffering. Both dimensions of pain seem impossibly subdued in the case of a terminal illness, especially one that is putrefactive, affecting one’s basic abilities to eat, drink, and speak. Yet dying is practically pleasant for Paul; he goes on maintaining erectile function and having regular sex with Prudence right through until the end. In the beginning of the novel, the couple are totally segregated, sleeping in separate rooms and aligned on non-overlapping schedules, not speaking or even seeing each other for weeks at a time. In his at-home hospice they are cuddling, sweet-talking, kissing, fucking, and falling asleep in each other’s arms like never before. They plummet deeply back in love as death approaches; Paul enjoys his encroaching silence.
Annihilation is Houellebecq’s most sprawling and novel, perhaps his best effort not only at situating himself within the tradition of romanticism, but also with the epic, and moreover the systems novel—but it is also his messiest. I have said nothing of its overarching Kaczynskian ecofascist conspiracy plot, and not only because it goes nowhere, as if Houellebecq halfheartedly strives toward the grand entropy of the Pynchonesque, then loses interest halfway, letting it fall by the points of its pentagram unresolved.
Then again, if one were to align Houellebecq with any American writer, it would have to be not Pynchon but DeLillo, pen to a very different strain of postmodernist paranoia. “The future belongs to crowds” for Houellebecq as well, but more perniciously so. Both authors write against systems of control and are deeply fascinated by terrorism in a phenomenological sense. However, DeLillo of course does not share his gallic reactionary preoccupation with replacement theory. And Houellebecq arguably takes DeLillo’s proclamation one step further: the future, longterm that is, belongs to nobody—extinction. In perhaps Houellebecq’s most DeLilloesqe scene, we also witness his highest death toll: the ecofascists, who will never be apprehended, torpedo a ship carrying immigrants in the Mediterranean and 500 innocent people drown; then, in a globally televised memorial, a group of G20 leaders assembles on an American air craft carrier and toss flowers into the sea, as a choir sings “Ode to Joy.”
This is the lasting image I have of the novel: a capsize, shipwreck. Not a requiem, but an ode. And an ode not to joy, but to death. To love, also: to the dream of until death do us part, or at least for the night. It strives toward the novel as rock ballad, which has been Houellebecq’s great ambition all along. Bruno notes in his final monologue, during which his presidential ambitions begin to dawn on him and Paul finally learns to stop listening, “In spite of everything, it had to be agreed that rock, that generation’s greatest artistic phenomenon, did not quite attain the beauty of romantic poetry; but it shared its creativity, its energy and also a kind of naivety.” (p. 505)
The keystone to Houellebecq’s oeuvre is his 1991 essay, “To Stay Alive: A Method,” essentially an anarchist manifesto for writing against nihilism as a method for staving off suicide, in the form of a letter addressed to young poets. It was later adapted into a narrative feature film starring himself and Iggy Pop in 2016, along with a cast of documentary subjects, everyday people living with severe mental illnesses, who make art as a survival tactic, not a therapeutic exercise. In the film, Houellebecq plays the character of a schizophrenic sculptor named Thomas who builds mysterious objects in his basement, which in banalized Borgesian pastiche, we never actually see. Thomas says facetiously in one of his mock interviews that he firmly situates himself in the latter category between two opposing kinds of artists: revolutionaries and decorators. (Houellebecq here is surely plagiarizing some other figure, or else modifying Paul Gauguin’s famous dichotomy that “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”) In the original essay (still the best thing he’s ever written), Houellebecq writes:
If you don’t write anymore, it is perhaps the prelude to a change in form. Or a change of theme. Or both. Or maybe it is, effectively, the prelude to your creative death. But you have no idea. You will never exactly know this part of yourself that pushes you to write.
Houellebecq may be retired as a novelist, but I can’t accept his resignation from creative life; it fundamentally betrays his entire ethos. Furthermore, Annihilation is far from a crowning achievement. It confirms his status not as a revolutionary (as if that were ever in question), not quite a literary rockstar (he would scoff at the notion), and not even a master interior decorator. Rather, Houellebecq dejectedly accepts his fate as just another popular author of his time—an object of fashion, not high literature. But if, like the Sherlock Holmes stories for Paul, Houellebecq’s novels can offer a reader some transient but real respite from suffering, that’s the most one can hope for; and it’s precisely this frail hopefulness that makes the novel a strong departure from his previous work. Maybe Michel Houellebecq will return to writing lyric poetry, continue acting in awful films, try his hand at photography again, or sculpture. Otherwise, adieu and good riddance—the sun is up.
Reviewed: Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (translated by Shaun Whiteside)
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—Lee Armistead Ritchie, 2024.
Very much enjoyed this lengthy and thoughtful review.
The thing that most interests me about Houellebecq is the central throughline of philosophy, i.e., of whether or not we can construct meaning in the age of Darwin & scientific materialism. Perhaps the answer in 'Annihilation' is somewhat unsatisfactory in that he himself has no compelling answer to this question.
If you like some of his work, you might also enjoy my novel, INCEL, which tackles similar themes, but in a contemporary American context. It was reviewed here: https://marsreview.org/p/where-have-all-the-rude-boys-gone