It Turns Out He Has a Heart

Danielle Chelosky examines Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation,” translated by Shaun Whiteside.

By Danielle CheloskyJune 14, 2025

• Fiction

FOR TOO LONG, the edgelords have claimed Michel Houellebecq. Right-wingers take delight in the French author’s reputation as a provocateur, including his central role in lawsuits for calling Islam “the stupidest religion” and for partaking in a sex tape with young artists. The misogyny peaked in his 1994 debut novel Whatever (when I went looking for a stream of its film adaptation, I could only find one on an incel forum, where men in the comments groaned about the lack of rape scenes). His Islamophobia reached its pinnacle in 2001’s Platform, whose depictions of a terrorist attack somewhat prophesied the bombings in Bali a year later. Last October, New York’s hipsters-turned-MAGA (including talentless hacks like Peter Vack and Coldhealing) got together and called themselves Houellebecqian e-boys. With Annihilation (tr. Shaun Whiteside, 2024), the 69-year-old’s alleged final book, Houellebecq has once again shown that he has far too much compassion to be conflated with such a soulless scene.

For the conservative-leaning publication Unherd, Ann Manov lamented that Houellebecq’s “sentimental swan song [fell] flat.” “I mourn the venom,” she went on. “I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.” But reducing Houellebecq’s characters to “bad guys” is misleading. The source of their bitterness can often be traced back to a culprit: “Bruno’s earliest memory was one of humiliation,” Houellebecq writes in The Elementary Particles (1998; tr. Frank Wynne, 2000), showing how misogyny is a result of emasculation. Similarly, Islamophobia is a projection of fear, as when the Platform protagonist’s father is murdered by a Muslim man. He seeks revenge but instead meets only more defeat when his lover is killed in a terrorist attack. He is not a bad guy; bad things happen to him that turn him resentful.

The endings often resemble resolution. Here are some of the final lines of The Elementary Particles:

This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love.

Such sentiments make you wonder why Houellebecq is considered such an offensive author, to the point where AI tools refuse to imitate him. From the final chapter of Platform (also translated by Wynne): “It’s possible to live in the world without understanding it; all you need is to be able to get food, caresses and love.” Hatred may burn at the corners of his narratives, but at the core is always the persistence of love—which would be a cliché, ineffective concept if Houellebecq hadn’t been so offensive and acidic on the way there.

For Artforum, Oskar Oprey argued that “Houellebecq shouldn’t be read by anyone under the age of thirty—the reader needs to have matured, like a stinky block of French cheese,” he wrote. “No twentysomething still in possession of their youthful idealism can properly savor the poetic bleakness of a novel such as Serotonin.” I’d argue the opposite (not just because I am 24 or because I don’t believe relatability is required to enjoy fiction): Houellebecq is a prime read for angsty quarter-life crisis havers, much like the way the Smiths’ indulgently miserable tunes resonate with teenage outcasts (The Baffler pointed out the uncanny commonalities between Morrissey and Houellebecq).

Annihilation’s narrator, Paul Raison, is, as usual, jaded and generally uninterested in living. While no longer feeling a spark with his wife Prudence, he works as an adviser to France’s finance minister, Bruno Juge, and deals with worsening instances of cyberterrorism, involving deepfakes of beheadings and strikes. Paul is not particularly moved by the incidents: “If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.”

The political plot is quickly eclipsed by the happenings within Paul’s family. Houellebecq’s strength has always been in his characters, and in Annihilation he spawns an intricate web of them. Paul’s father suffers a stroke and Paul returns to his childhood home, witnessing his siblings’ places in their lives. When Paul’s father is admitted into a neglectful facility, Paul and his sister Cécile and brother Aurélien embark on a mission to get him out.

If you’re nostalgic for Houellebecq’s cruel descriptions of women, there’s Paul’s resentful attitude toward Prudence in the beginning, as well as Aurélien’s feelings toward his wife Indy: “For two or three years Aurélien had toyed with the idea of killing her, sometimes by poison, most often by strangling, he imagined her breath dwindling, the cracking of her cervical bones.” Aurélien’s spirits lift upon meeting a mistress: “He felt like a man; it was disturbing and new,” but he ultimately kills himself when faced with the intimidating, complicated idea of divorce. Here is Houellebecq’s signature beloved venom—only this time it’s not at the center. Since the indulgently nihilistic Whatever, Houellebecq has assigned meaning to misery—it offers a challenge to overcome, as Paul does in Annihilation. It’s no longer misery for misery’s sake. Could it be that, as Houellebecq approaches his seventies, he has realized that aging is not so bad after all? At the end of 2010’s The Map and the Territory, protagonist Jed Martin nears his demise and the narrator reflects (in Gavin Bowd’s translation): “Come on, he hadn’t had such a bad life.”

The way the personal overshadows the political in Annihilation contrasts the public’s tendency to criticize Houellebecq’s politics while ignoring the other aspects of his work. It’s especially significant in a time when politics are often prioritized over the personal, and when art is constantly scrutinized through a political lens, with readers commonly presuming that the author holds the same views as their characters. When asked about critics who deem him irresponsible, Houellebecq responded, “It’s not my role to be responsible. I don’t feel responsible.” But an irresponsible author communicates the views of an irresponsible public that’s rampant with Islamophobia. If the Islamophobia in his books serves any purpose, it’s in showing a common perspective that helps one understand what lies beneath racism—that, unlike with the edgelords, it is not hatred but fear, a very human feeling. Fear is not something to be proud of, but instead ashamed; Houellebecq is not advocating for Islamophobia but conveying the collective experience of paranoia, which must be overcome. Casual Islamophobia is one of many disagreeable aspects of his unlikable characters, and the scariest part is seeing yourself in them, realizing how similar we can be to someone who holds vastly different beliefs from our own.

Despite Paul claiming he couldn’t blame those who wanted to obliterate the world, he and his family come together to try to save his father. Scattered throughout the malaise are moments of deep gratitude, like when Paul’s romance with Prudence rekindles and he ruminates that “there was no point thinking about the past, and there wasn’t even much point thinking about the future; it was enough to be alive.”

Much of his turmoil comes from struggling to deal with the inevitability of decay: “What he couldn’t bear, he had realized uneasily, was impermanence; it was the idea that something, anything, could come to an end; what he couldn’t bear was simply one of life’s fundamental conditions.” It’s not necessarily a terrible problem to have, considering it means that you derive joy from beginnings and middles. Toward the end, Paul becomes sick, slowly turning into his father. Overwhelmed by ailments and approaching death, Paul is amazed to discover that his penis still works. Prudence mounts him, and their physical communion briefly defies death; deterioration is not so bad after all. Sex serves as an oasis, and the most plausible position is sideways, where he can penetrate her and fall asleep holding her—a humanizing, loving arrangement. Acceptance of the ephemeral nature of everything arrives: “Moments happen or don’t happen, people’s lives are altered and sometimes destroyed by them, and what can one say? What can one do? Apparently nothing.”

Annihilation is the only logical conclusion to Houellebecq’s corpus—a risky leap into mature sincerity, shedding the bleak nihilist armor. His cynicism has always been a shield that he lowers to offer impactful glimpses of humanity and tenderness, but Annihilation is his least guarded. The edgelords are upset because, after everything, it turns out he has a heart. He may appear cartoonish, showing up to interviews mumbling laconic, vague answers, while procuring “a leather diary, a vape, a glasses case, a handkerchief, a pack of 20 Benson & Hedges Platinum and a couple of lighters” from his jacket; he may call himself a “nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist […] an unremarkable author with no style” in letters with philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy published in 2008’s Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World. But Houellebecq makes it clear in his art that, deep inside him, he has hope; that even when he wishes for annihilation, he doesn’t really mean it.