Michel Houellebecq Explains Himself

In his debut novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq wrote that “the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness.” And yet, the 1994 bildungsroman—which featured an unnamed, vividly sullen, and suicidal narrator—inspired an entire youth subculture in France now known as “depressionism.” With that despondent style as a mold, Houellebecq, now 68, has since written numerous, always male, protagonists who occupy uninspiring jobs and navigate life through detached reflections on philosophy, politics, and religion, their sense of responsibility eroded by defeatist attitudes. In Annihilation—his eighth and most recent work of fiction published in English by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2024—Paul, an aide to the finance minister of France, lives in a fog of loneliness, noting that for as long as he could remember, “nothingness” had always been a part of his relationships, platonic or otherwise.