The French writer’s novels have foretold coming catastrophes with uncanny prescience—and his ambivalence toward modernity has much to teach us.
Michel Houellebecq is a writer of the after—after history, after God, after politics, after romance, and after happiness. He chronicles a world in which we watch ourselves live, poisoned by irony, oscillating between nihilism and hedonism, until the difference between the two becomes imperceptible. Houellebecq captures this post-world without adornment. His characters are lonely, sexless, and impotent. They seek something higher and seldom find it. They try to escape from their condition but cannot. For Houellebecq, the impossibility of escape is the defining feature of our age. As he puts it in Platform (2001), “everything can happen in life, most of all nothing.” It’s not merely that nothing happens, but that nothing will happen. As a civilization, we may have done things in the past. But our present precludes the future tense.
