Annihilation (Anéantir)
By Michel Houellebecq.
Translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Hardcover, 544 pages, $30.00.
Reviewed by Pedro Blas González.
France in 2027 is the setting of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Annihilation (Anéantir). France is morally, socially, and politically coming apart at the seams; meaninglessness has become the staple of dysfunctional lives. The French author delivers readers into the entrails of life-numbing nihilism in late postmodernity.
Paul, the main character, is an advisor to the Minister of Finance. Prudence, his wife, is a Department of the Treasury official. Their loveless, stale marriage is a microcosm of the inanity of late postmodern life.
The author explores the acerbic nihilism, godlessness, rampant terrorism, and sexual aberration of life in late postmodernity, and these are only a select few of the dominant themes in this author’s novels. Houellebecq surprises his most virulent critics and detractors by turning his attention to the redemptive value of Catholic morality and values.
Because Houellebecq’s characters, at best, represent moral and spiritual dysfunctionality and, at worst, full-blown caustic vulgarity, Annihilation turns a new page in his writing—pardon the pun.
Paul’s Catholic sister and her husband are both contented, well-adjusted people. Yet the rest of the characters form a latter-day menagerie of morally and spiritually stunted personages incapable of self-reflection—a cross-section and slice of life in late postmodern nihilism, the author suggests. While reading Houellebecq, one finds oneself asking: “When have I met some of these people before?”
Houellebecq’s plot, the interaction of the characters with each other, thorny situations, and contingencies to be worked out in the novel drive a hard-hitting critique of dysfunctional societies and our throwaway, late postmodern milieu. Houellebecq begs the question: Does late postmodern relativism pretend it can sustain itself without imploding?
Judging by his interviews and previous novels, Houellebecq proposes that in the degenerate, late postmodern world, it is harder than most people suspect for most people to be happy and experience well-grounded lives unless a moral and spiritual renewal takes place.
However, Houellebecq offers a caveat against hopelessness. Beginning in the second half of the novel, after a vast portion of the plot mechanism has become manifest, Houellebecq introduces readers to the revamped possibilities for human life that love offers. The author does not mean the platitudinous affectation and ideological virtue signaling of wokeness. Instead, Houellebecq explores sacrifice and grace in the Catholic faith and life-long commitment to another person.
Paul’s personal world is in disarray. His marriage is a facade, his father has a debilitating stroke, and he finds himself embroiled in his boss’s presidential campaign, the Minister of Finance. Part of Paul’s job is to uncover the perpetrators of cyberterrorism, which is inspired by devil worship. Houellebecq intimates that this aspect of the plot serves to call attention to the seemingly demonic forces that late postmodernism has unleashed.
Slowly, Paul becomes jaded by the meaninglessness and purposelessness that he encounters in the world. He begins to seek redemption—salvation, dare I say—by turning his back on a dysfunctional late postmodern world fueled by corrupting innocence, beauty, and good will. This is when Paul begins to rekindle his relationship with his sister; she acts as a sober force in his groggy existential crisis.
New readers of Houellebecq might find Annihilation representative of the world outside their door. Does the novel speak loudest to the private world of nihilists? Readers will decide.
On the other hand, return readers of Houellebecq will applaud the poignant descriptive ability of a novelist who is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Houellebecq is a writer and public intellectual, not a woke academic sociologist.
For Houellebecq, a rose is still a rose no matter the ideological mania for name-changing that virtue-signaling affectation foments. Like the Spanish writer and public intellectual Juan Manuel de Prada, Houellebecq believes writers should work to dethrone ideology from postmodernity.
Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.
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