That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.
As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.
Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.
In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).
In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.
Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.
You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.
And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.
Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.
That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”
Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés.”
There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.
All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.
The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.
The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.
Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.
In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.
Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.
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SubscribeHave read the whole article twice and I kept thinking of Monty Python.
Me too
Sodomy, bestiality and ennui. That’s about it. Can I have my doctorate now?
My upcoming dissertation on:
“rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.”” (from Churchill’s quote, not the Punk song)
is coming along very well, and I expect my PhD any day….
Fabulous article – probably the best writer on UnHerd at the mo.
Wow, you understood it, you must be well clever
Why are we still droning on about French intellectuals?
It’s over for the French.
Their intellectuals, whom they rely on for guidance, are fraudulent, conformist, overeducated apparatchiks.
They are physical cowards who ran away from threat at critical points rather than stand and fight.
They are morally corrupt because they are lazy and expect immigrants to do their dirty work while denying those immigrants a fair place in society in return.
And they’re all so interminably miserable. I’m guessing there isn’t a French word for craic, which is as much a part of life as all their existential angst.
Gosh, Houellebecq is probably the funniest writer in the world, and he is certainly no conformist intellectual. Try ‘Submission’.
Agreed. Serotonine is also an absolute classic.
He is funny and that is overlooked .The woke disapproval of him is as you said ‘lazy’. I would add facile..
I agree. Nothing conformist about “Submission”, a highly original yet timely book.
Give me an Englishman* any day. “Most people would rather die than think, and most do”.
(*Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970.)
Wasn’t Russell, along with most of his set, of the view that those considered unthinking should not be allowed to breed? Or least in no greater number than those required for physical and servile tasks?
Yes, precisely. Were they wrong?
Are you available to chair the ‘breeding’ committee? Mass compulsory sterilisation will be ‘interesting’.
Noticed the hostage taker from the uk shot dead in America had a mere 6 children . Obviously he was a super efficient dad with time to worry about busting lady jihadists from prison .
Nothing to do with Islam though…
Thanks, Esther, this was a very interesting piece which made me want to read Houellebecq!
I speak sub-fluent French and, apart from Edward St Aubyn, Houellebecq is more or less the only living novelist I read. Apart from these two, I deliberately read only dead white mostly males, in an endeavour to “épater les reveillards”.
Why this Unherd’s obsession for Houellebecq ?
Because he writes good click-bait
Having clocked the photo of Esther Manov I read that as chick-bait.
I image in because he’s the only writer alive today that people might still be reading in 100 years.
I have a long time interest in Houellebecq which began with Submission. Read all his books and far too many reviews by French or English critics. This the single best review/take, of not just this novel, but all his work I have ever come across. I am not in the lit crit business but IMO the author of this piece certainly should be.
Reading Submission was like reading a description of a French stereotype:
Do the French really aspire to this still ?
I remember some American Film Critic describing all French Movies:
‘Two couples each have adulterous affairs with each other spouse – then go to dinner and talk about it for 3 hours.’
Cope
That wasn’t my experience of reading Soumission at all. To me, it was a fairly savage satire of Parisian hipsterism.
I managed a paragraph but didn’t have the foggiest what it was about.
I thought I’d come to the comments but, ladies and gents, you seem little wiser than I.
De Sade, Reage and Welbeck have pretty much taken ownership of s*domy for the French. I honestly can’t think of any other language in which there is so much written about it. Thank God for Anais Nin otherwise I’d really worry about French literature.
‘Here in America ,at least, there’s plenty of slumming it , reheated -Carver poverty porn and box-checking census -opera ‘
You mean My name is Lucy Barton ?
The only thing I find interesting about Houellebecq is that I used to work in a West End street named after him (Welbeck Street; same name). I’ve read a lot of this sort of article about him, but none has ever given me the feeling that I need to read anything he’s written. I suspect his books are like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, or indeed any literary prize winner, in that quite a lot of people buy them, but famously, almost nobody ever actually reads them.
Touche
Touché surely?
Touchy if referring to T Hopp.
Smartypants1
Interesting – I reread Nineteen Eighty-Four every few years and it just gets better and better.
Au contraire! (See what I did there?) – I’ve read a few of his novels and I liked them all very much. He’s one of the few contemporary writers of literary fiction who it seems to me actually gets read by people who aren’t members of book circles or themselves writers of contemporary fiction. A tad on the gloomy side, but I’m a miserable ba****d.
Jon, try reading Submission, it’s astonishingly good, and not at all hard to read. He’s dark, but he’s also funny. Anyway, don’t comment on him any more till you’ve read him, or at least seriously tried.
Nothing like Mandolin thank God. Try Atomised.
Hmm. After a slow start I couldn’t put Mandolin down. Caught the night bus home rather than the train so I had longer to read then carried on reading till 6 am anyway when I had finished the book and got through a loo roll crying.
They’re nothing like that. The sort of bourgeois triumphalist twerp who likes Captain Corelli’s Mandolin would loathe Houellebecq. You should read him.
What a convoluted article. KISS.