Michel Houellebecq’s characters spend a lot of time in supermarkets. In the opening pages of The Elementary Particles, the depressed main character scarfs down a prepackaged fillet of monkfish, sold under the “gourmet” line of the French supermarket brand Monoprix. In Submission, the narrator experiences a fleeting moment of existential dread when he reflects on having to choose between three microwavable chicken options. After quitting his job and moving into a hotel, the even more despondent hero of Serotonin finds relief upon discovering the multitude of hummus flavors available at his local “Carrefour City,” a better option than his local Monoprix: “I had had an inkling since my first visit that this shop would play an important part in my new life.” But perhaps the most glowing depiction of all comes in The Map and the Territory, when the author refers to a Casino hypermarket and a Shell gas station as the only “perceptible centers of energy” in the notoriously sleepy town of… Paris.

For the 68-year-old French novelist, these low temples of consumerism capture humanity’s warped sense of freedom: They are “the only social propositions likely to provoke desire, happiness, or joy.” Here his characters can bask in the great halogen lights of economic progress, mesmerized by the variety of offerings and comforted by the convenience of the shopping experience. It is here, too, where they can be made aware of the smallness of their lives, the vast distances they stand from the production process, their alienation from their work and the goods they consume. They can, in Houellebecq’s view, understand what life is like in the 21st century: a world in which humanity has veered off course in ways we’re still trying to account for.

Reading these scenes, one finds Houellebecq at his finest: An acerbic critic of consumer society, he is also a shrewd observer of the absurdity of life under late-stage capitalism. A visionary of the commonplace, he can find both meaning and its absence in something as banal as an aisle in a local Monoprix or a gas pump at a Shell station. Contrary to his self-cultivated image as a literary celebrity—reinforced by his penchant for chain smoking at his few public appearances—Houellebecq is not a misanthrope; he is a humanist who has become disappointed by all that humanity currently has to offer. His novels, in the end, always seem to ask: Do we not deserve better?

In Houellebecq’s latest, Annihilation, a 544-page doorstop, frozen food once again makes an appearance as a signifier of this disappointment. The main character, Paul, works as an adviser to the French finance minister, a job that consumes most of his waking hours and leads to the unraveling of his marriage. After he and his wife, Prudence, who is a vegan, agree to keep separate spaces for their food, Paul starts buying himself dishes from small local shops—but eventually abandons this approach in favor of the more reliable microwavable food from Monoprix Gourmet. Paul’s personal favorite is the chicken tagine, assembled from multiple countries within the European Union.

Houellebecq could never be described as even remotely progressive. But for years, there was a kind of political ambiguity to his work and his public persona. While his books criticized the spiritual emptiness of the West and the tyranny of unbridled choice imposed by economic liberalism, the question of what should come next was left largely unanswered. And although his works seemed to detest our present capitalist age, they expressed their criticism in terms that were not all that materialist in nature. He was not provoked by the system’s social injustice so much as by the general malaise it caused and the often bewildering descents into libertinism and New Age mysticism it prompted.

These questions were at the forefront of The Elementary Particles, which took for its subject the trajectory of two radically different half-brothers coming of age in the aftermath of the 1960s—one a renowned and reclusive molecular biologist named Michel, the other a sex-crazed public-school teacher named Bruno. A lost soul in search of himself, Bruno travels to a campground frequented by left-wing hippies, nudists, dejected civil servants, and fellow aimless wanderers. While the campground is ostensibly political and spiritual, what he finds is that its guru is a fraud and almost everyone else is there to have sex. Bruno is not necessarily disappointed by this fact. Without any spiritual or political subterfuge needed, he can achieve relief in every sense of the word. His sexual liberation proves, however, to be not all that different from the New Age gibberish that he finds all around him. Both are the products of a listless society rejecting the emptiness of consumerism but with nothing to fill the void other than a set of made-up beliefs and practices.

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For years, Houellebecq seemed content to stick to this kind of social criticism and satire. In an era of limitless choice, instant gratification, and information overload, he appeared to view the very production of literature as a kind of subtle act of resistance. At least he theorized as much in his disarmingly earnest 1992 essay “Approaches to Disarray.” In a section of the essay titled “The World as Supermarket and Derision”—yes, the grocery aisles once again—Houellebecq celebrates novels for nothing short of their ability to summon humanity:

A book can only be appreciated slowly; it involves reflection (not mainly in the sense of intellectual effort, but in that of looking back); there is no reading without pausing, without reverse movement, without re-reading. This is impossible and even absurd in a world where everything evolves, everything fluctuates, and nothing has permanent validity; neither rules, nor things, nor human beings. With all its strength (which was great), literature opposes the notion of permanent topicality, of the perpetual present. Books call for readers; but these readers must have an individual and stable existence: they cannot be pure consumers, pure phantoms; they must also be, in some way, subjects.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Houellebecq seemed to take this duty of opposing the “000perpetual present” quite seriously. In those two decades, he published five novels. Some were more middling works (such as Platform, which rehashes the themes of The Elementary Particles) and others brilliant send-ups of cultural elites (such as The Map and the Territory), but all sought to capture the struggle for purpose in a world overflowing with choice and possibility. Houellebecq’s fascination with distraught, sex-deprived males can be disquieting—it’s not hard to imagine a convert to inceldom nodding along to an uncritical reading. But the comic edge that runs through these novels shows that the writer’s pessimism should not be mistaken for misanthropy. As Houellebecq himself observed in a 2000 essay about the rock musician Neil Young, “Young’s songs are made for those who are often unhappy, lonely, approaching the gateways of despair—but who continue to believe that happiness is possible.”

One could say the same of Houellebecq’s work, though another line in that essay might apply even more: “None of his albums are perfect; but I don’t know one that doesn’t have at least one magnificent song.”

Yet something seemed to change with Houellebecq starting in the early 2010s. After years of dedication to the cause of literature, seemingly sticking to his role of chronicler and satirist, he began to make more overtly political interventions.

To be sure, Houellebecq had been making sweeping comments about those portions of the population who are not white men since the beginning of his literary career, and many of them have not been all that egalitarian. In a short text that originally appeared as an afterword to a 1998 edition of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, he declared that he had “always considered feminists to be amiable dimwits, harmless in principle, but unfortunately made dangerous by their disarming lack of lucidity.” And in an interview in 2001, he declared that Islam was “the stupidest religion of all”—drawing a lawsuit that ended in his acquittal.

Still, public utterances like these were relatively limited, and despite some criticism, most of the French press was forgiving. After all, Houellebecq was becoming an international literary celebrity, and the French media establishment, closely entwined with the world of Left Bank publishers, was happy to have someone who unabashedly embraced the role. Occasional provocations even seemed to help solidify this new status. In 2010, he won the prestigious Goncourt Prize for The Map and the Territory, a satire of the contemporary art world and French society.

But 2015 seemed to mark a turning point. Early that year, Houellebecq published the novel Submission, which told the story of a fictional Muslim Brotherhood–backed candidate who wins the French presidential election and imposes Islamist reforms on a detached and compliant populace. The book was released the same day as the deadly terrorist attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo (a caricature of the aging novelist figured on the cover that fateful Wednesday). Shortly thereafter, Houellebecq was placed under police protection. And with the country uniting over a defense of freedom of expression and satire, Submission became a bestseller, even as it fed fears about a faith practiced by millions of French citizens. Houellebecq was looked upon to help understand the moment—perhaps unfairly so—but he seemed to relish his new role. After the even deadlier November 2015 terrorist attack in France, the novelist blasted the country’s leaders for their inability to protect the population, slamming President François Hollande as an “insignificant opportunist” and describing the prime minister in even more offensive terms.

Since then, Houellebecq has ramped up his often reactionary and xenophobic political interventions, many revolving around his obsession with Islam. In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2017, he claimed that Muslims could be integrated into French society only if Catholicism became the state religion. Two years later, the conservative Christian journal First Things published a long discussion between Houellebecq and his new friend Geoffroy Lejeune, then the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, the country’s best-known far-right magazine, and one of the rising stars of a newly energized French conservative movement. In a wide-ranging conversation, the pair lamented the Catholic Church’s loss of influence and agreed about the necessity to restore its “former splendor.” If a trace of irony was intended, it was hard to spot: Houellebecq appeared to be deadly serious.

If one began to worry about whether Houellebecq had finally gone off the deep end, another threshold was crossed in 2022. In November, the magazine Front Populaire published a discussion between the novelist and its founder, Michel Onfray, a philosopher and essayist who views himself in the mold of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but who, like many other French intellectuals, now devotes much of his energy to pontificating about immigration and national identity. (Perhaps in this way he was not entirely unlike Proudhon, who was known not only for his animus toward property but for his antisemitism.) In the interview, Houellebecq laments the influence of American wokisme in France, proclaiming: “Our only chance of survival is for white supremacism to become trendy in the United States.” He then appears to try to outdo Onfray’s taste for reactionary politics and refers to the “great replacement”—the conspiracy theory developed by Renaud Camus, according to which governments in Europe and North America are deliberately flooding their countries with non-white people—as “not a theory” but “a fact.” More disturbingly, he cites the Spanish Reconquista as a model for resisting such a replacement and suggests that France is likely to see a number of “reverse Bataclans,” a reference to the Parisian concert hall attacked by ISIS in November 2015. “People are arming themselves,” Houellebecq was originally quoted as saying. “They’re getting guns, taking classes in shooting ranges. And they’re not all hotheads. When full territories are under Islamic control, I think acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims—in short, reverse Bataclans.”

Predictably, the interview produced a wave of outrage. The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris sued Houellebecq for “provoking hate against Muslims,” withdrawing the lawsuit only after the writer vowed to apologize and clarify his remarks in a subsequent book. And indeed, Houellebecq went on to address this conflict in Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life), a short book released in 2023 that remains untranslated. His extended mea culpa also covers the entirely separate kerfuffle of his appearance in pornographic scenes in an experimental Dutch film, something he maintains was unintentional, and it did reveal a Houellebecq who remains sensitive about his image. He wants to offend, but not too much—or so it seemed. To account for his misdeeds and to help promote his book, Houellebecq even did a television interview for the first time in eight years, choosing, of all places, Quotidien, a decidedly left-leaning talk show with a youngish audience, to explain himself. The result was a painfully awkward 30-minute segment in which an unkempt and frail-looking Houellebecq draws out long silences and occasionally giggles to himself. As always, one couldn’t help but wonder how much of this was a performance, part of his familiar shtick. Was he really just putting us all on?

One might have thought that Houellebecq had gotten his fill of politics for a while. But with the mess from the Onfray interview and the semi-pornographic film apparently cleaned up, he has since moved on to his next crusade, which also happens to be one shared by the French far right: the immorality of euthanasia, a theme that looms in the background of his new novel, Annihilation.

For years, Houellebecq’s novels were seen as providing genuine insights into contemporary France —and at times they did. The Map and the Territory revealed a country grappling with its loss of economic and cultural power and the overlapping spheres of influence inhabited by its trendsetting elites. For all its excess, Submission shined a light on the anxieties produced by the visible expansion of Islam in a deeply secular nation, a challenge few people in France would deny. And with its sympathetic depiction of farmers struggling to make ends meet in a hypercompetitive globalized market, Serotonin echoed aspects of the Yellow Vest movement: The novel came out a little more than a month after the revolts erupted over the government’s proposed hike in the fuel tax, drawing support from rural and exurban France.

Compared with these novels, Annihilation can feel off-kilter. Its long and convoluted narrative involves the intensely private struggles of its protagonist, Paul, and his two siblings as they grapple with the aftermath of their father’s stroke, as well as Paul’s attempts to revive his failing marriage with his wife, Prudence. Meanwhile, the novel’s overtly political plot lines—intelligence officials trying to uncover the perpetrators of a series of mysterious cyberattacks and politicians from the ruling party navigating an uncertain 2027 presidential election campaign—feel almost forced, as if Houellebecq is grasping at news pegs to retain our attention and summon the old magic.

At the same time, Annihilation does provide us with a window into the ultraconservative worldview of its author. While it features a protagonist grappling with the classic Houellebecqian malaise, this time around he’s aided by dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. Paul’s sister, Cécile, is a practicing Catholic who convinces her siblings of the continued value of their father’s life despite his inability to speak or move. Along with her husband, Hervé, an unemployed notary with experience in a hard-right student group, Cécile proudly votes for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Pillars of virtue and resolve from the deindustrialized North of France, they appear in the novel as the good guys—fighting the treacherous schemes of a nasty left-wing Parisian journalist named Indy, who is married to Paul and Cécile’s depressed younger brother, Aurélien, and connives to obtain scoops and money from the family.

While Houellebecq’s previous novels lampooned the emptiness of consumerism and highlighted the moral quandaries unleashed by unregulated capitalism, this novel finds itself praising one of the free market’s most steadfast defenders in France: It features a prominent character, Bruno Juge, who is clearly based on Bruno Le Maire, France’s minister of the economy and finance from 2017 until 2024. The architect of President Emmanuel Macron’s signature tax cuts on wealth and capital gains, Le Maire has also written several novels (including one while in office) and is a personal friend of Houellebecq. As with the rest of Macron’s cabinet, Le Maire’s policies appealed to a wealthier, older share of the French population—Houellebecq’s demographic. And by all accounts, the novelist approves. From Bruno’s very first appearance in the novel (also as the minister of the economy and finance) to his role in the presidential campaign that heats up near its end, this fictional version of Le Maire is given a flattering portrayal, depicted as principled, effective, and ready to serve in the Élysée Palace himself.

Then we return to poor old Paul, sleepwalking through his marriage with Prudence, who is an official in the treasury department, and avoiding the more agonizing questions of life by devoting himself to his work with Bruno. Paul is eventually forced to confront these problems once his father suffers a stroke. And he seems to find some answers, rediscovering the importance of familial bonds and his bloodline’s rootedness in the rural Beaujolais region. Spending time with Cécile at the old family abode, Paul ends up convinced that his father deserves to live, but also that the state-run medical system is not providing him with the care he needs.

Debated in real life by the National Assembly this past spring, euthanasia is a hot-button topic in France, and Houellebecq’s views on the matter come through crystal clear in Annihilation, which depicts it as a product of the same terrible societal neglect of the elderly that afflicts Paul’s father. By the end of the novel, Paul’s experience of caring for his father somehow also rejuvenates his bond with Prudence, lending him a renewed sense of purpose before further tragedies strike.

By the time one has slogged through Annihilation’s 544 pages, it’s hard to escape the sense that the novel might have worked better as a series of essays: a blistering op-ed against euthanasia, an homage to Macron’s economic policies, a sarcastic diatribe against gender-bending wokistes—the kind of political intervention that Houellebecq is increasingly fond of making.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of Annihilation is that it feels more like background noise in a country that almost handed the National Rally a governing majority this year. Given the extensive selection of hard-right intellectuals and talking heads that French consumers now have at their disposal, Houellebecq’s latest novel offers just a slightly different flavor of right-wing reaction. It’s easy to imagine one of the tortured characters of his earlier books strolling through a Monoprix, glancing at the cover of this one, shrugging his shoulders, and picking up a frozen pizza instead.