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.