It is not for his plots that one reads Houellebecq, nor for his characterizations. His protagonists are always the same or similar: men approaching or in middle age who are intelligent and well educated and who, from a materialistic point of view, have no problems; they do not suffer the sordid anxiety that arises from having to make ends meet. Their only problem is that they don’t know how to live or what to live for.
They are not disillusioned, because they have never had any illusions.
They are without religion, without political belief, even without culture, at least in the sense of its being a vital force of their lives rather than an ornament or a pastime.
Their human, familial, and sexual relations are shallow, based on the feelings of the moment, without any adherence to or control by traditional values. In a sense they are free, but only in the way that a particle in Brownian motion is free.
Loneliness is their fate, and it is, one may infer, the natural consequence of the kind of freedom promoted by the revolutionaries of May 1968.
The revolutionaries sowed the wind and reaped nihilism; and so there is a strong element of nostalgia running through Houellebecq’s work, without any consolatory suggestion that the omelette could be returned to its eggs.
Never before in history, suggests Houellebecq, have we been so prosperous, and never before so incompetent in the matter of knowing how to live.
