I meet Michel Houellebecq at Maison Péret, a busy brasserie serving regional French cuisine in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. He’s bang on time for lunch — which is to say he arrives at 6pm. “I can’t have a meal without drinking wine,” he had explained in a brief email exchange before our encounter. “After that, it’s all over, I can’t stop drinking, so I try to delay the fateful hour.” Impressed by his attempt at moderation, I am happy to agree.
France’s most famous contemporary writer is wearing a parka, just like the one he was going about in when I last saw him 15 years ago. Taking it off to reveal a pearl-snap denim shirt and black jeans, he looks worn out, his blue eyes only half open. But he greets me with a faint smile and we perform the ritual of the Parisian bise, two kisses, one on each cheek.
He glances at the menu brought by Jérémy, who turns out to be an energetic waiter of the best Parisian sort. Among other things, the menu offers wild snails. “I find it disturbing that snails are wild,” says my guest.
Houellebecq starts by talking about Poland, where we originally met. He was on a book tour, and I was the journalist tasked with interviewing him on stage in several cities. I have vivid memories of running back and forth along the train with his interpreter and publisher, desperately seeking an empty compartment so he could defy the smoking ban. He, on the other hand, has no recollection of ever meeting me, nor even that I had brought up the encounter in our recent email exchange. Clearly there are more interviewers in his life than Michel Houellebecqs in mine.
The wine list runs to eight pages, but he looks briefly and asks for a mere glass — rather to my disappointment after all the build-up. Since I’m going to have some too, I up the stakes and suggest a bottle. At the waiter’s recommendation, we go for a Chablis.
I’ve been waiting to ask what he thinks of France’s new prime minister Michel Barnier, announced a few hours earlier that day after months of rancorous negotiations. Houellebecq is friends with former president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, knows the far-right politician Éric Zemmour “un peu”, and has peopled his latest novel Annihilation, coming out in English this month, with characters inspired by President Emmanuel Macron and the finance minister Bruno Le Maire.
I’m in for a disappointment. Houellebecq, who doesn’t own a smartphone, learns that there’s a new prime minister only from me, and says he has never even heard of Barnier. He seems excited by the news, though, just as he’s amused at his own ignorance.
The author of Atomised (1998) is France’s most praised — and hated — novelist. His characters break taboos, expressing politically incorrect and often outrageous thoughts on an array of subjects, from immigration to the role of women. Citing Dickens and Balzac as his influences, and often employing speculative fiction, he portrays society without sentiment — and sometimes, one would hope, with distortion. He has sold millions of copies worldwide.
What is it, I ask, that has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years? “Immigration,” he answers without hesitation. “And also, the total scorn of the elites.”
He’s speaking in a low voice, in short sentences interspersed with long pauses, every now and then popping mysterious pills from a plastic bag. He mentions the 2005 referendum on the European constitution. The result was “No”, later overridden by the French parliament. “It was almost 20 years ago and people still remember it,” he says. “They really made fools of us.”
“It’s dangerous to mock people,” he adds, and pauses. “I mean, you can mock them, but there are limits.”
The big political story in France this year has been the challenge from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN). After the far-right party’s strong performance in European elections in June, Macron called a snap parliamentary election. The RN won fewer seats than expected in the Assemblée Nationale, coming third as leftwing and centrist parties rallied together, some of their candidates pulling out to boost the chances of candidates most likely to beat the far right. Houellebecq calls this “blocking” of the RN “disturbing”.
The elites, he says, think of people as ploucs. “In America the equivalent is hillbilly.” Does he actually like hillbillies? I ask. He takes a while to consider. “Yes,” he says finally, but he pleads to not having any friends among the category. “I’m faithful to my class.”
He’s a great admirer of Christopher Lasch, an American historian who argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries. “He was ahead of his time,” says Houellebecq. These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility, he muses. “Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.”
As a starter, Houellebecq has chosen herring, and it arrives with salad and potatoes. “From the Middle Ages until the 1950s, herring and cod were the only fish available,” he explains. “We didn’t know how to preserve them so other fish didn’t spread much.” He tells me the story of a famous chef, François Vatel, who was going to cook fish for Louis XIV but the delivery didn’t arrive, so he took his own life. “One didn’t joke. We took food very seriously already under Louis XIV.”
Houellebecq, like Lasch, has a reputation for future gazing. Serotonin, which came out in January 2019, featured a rebellion of French farmers against an end to EU quotas. It came out just as the gilets jaunes were spilling on to the Paris streets.
He has a long history with the topic of immigration, especially that of Muslims. In 2001 he called Islam “the stupidest religion”, and was sued — unsuccessfully — for inciting racial hatred. His novel Submission, which came out on January 7 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack, tells the story of an Islamist takeover of France. Perhaps the real target is not so much political Islam as the hypocrisy of what Houellebecq calls “the moral left”, which, after the Islamisation of the country in the book, ends up consenting to the disappearance of women from the public sphere.
“In France, immigrants from northern Africa, who are usually Muslim, don’t integrate well,” he continues. Doesn’t integration take time? “In France, it’s the reverse,” he says. “It’s the second or third generation that is making trouble. We are witnessing a disassimilation. It’s a catastrophe.”
He pours me more wine and I ask about his recent move to Normandy. “Paris is too small. I wanted space.” Besides, he says, Paris is not as good as it used to be. Why not? “Oh, because of all the bikes.”
He has recently written a book titled Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life), about two personal controversies. One followed his participation in an experimental porn film produced by a Dutch art collective. The move spoke to a preoccupation of his work: criticising liberalism, Houellebecq often deplores male difficulties on the sexual market and his characters, usually unloved men, use casual sex, porn and prostitution as remedies to their plight. After some initial shooting, Houellebecq pulled out of the project and went to court to stop the film’s release. He lost, although the release is still pending. I decide to leave this topic discreetly to one side.
The other controversy was caused by an interview he gave in which he said: “The wish of the native French population, as they say, is not that Muslims assimilate, but that they stop stealing from them and attacking them — or else, another solution, that they go,” predicted “acts of resistance” against Muslims in France and said that some French people expected “a civil war in the near future”. Even the RN’s president Jordan Bardella considered these “generalisations” “excessive”. The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris announced he had started legal action against the novelist but after meeting him, was satisfied with an apology.
Is he still predicting civil war? Houellebecq takes time to think. “No. There will be lots of violence but not between Muslims and non-Muslims,” he says. “Until recently all the immigrants coming to France were from the same two regions, north and west Africa. Now they come from all sorts of places, Pakistan, Chechnya, Somalia and other countries.” Some are Christian. “They bring their conflicts here . . . There are ethnic wars in France to control drug trafficking,” he says, echoing a common trope in French media. “Some end in submachine gun fire.” He pauses. “Well, it could be worse. In France, it’s still relatively difficult to get a submachine gun.”
It is just over two hours from London on Eurostar, but I’m a universe away from my British citizenship ceremony two days previously where the mayor was celebrating the naturalisation of people from 40 different nationalities as “a blessing” and “richness”.
I say that in Britain, many people think that they — and the west in general — have a debt towards former colonies. “In France, nobody gives a damn. We have no guilt,” he says, dipping his baguette in the sauce from the herring.
Ordinary French people, such as his paternal grandparents, didn’t even know France had colonies, he says. “The only exception was Algeria, which was a settlement, not a colony. People who had been born and raised there had to leave. They never forgave Charles De Gaulle for giving it up,” he says. His mother came from a family of French settlers in Algeria and Houellebecq lived there as a young child.
His paternal grandparents were both working-class, employed by the SNCF, the French national railway company, he tells me. He has previously expressed love for them, particularly for his grandmother, who brought him up for large parts of his childhood in place of his bohemian mother and father.
He studied agronomy, not literature. “I wanted something practical. I already knew how to read,” he deadpans. He wasn’t a part of the Parisian literary circles. Is that why he had the courage to provoke? “Dear Magdalena,” he says, brightening. “It’s easy to be courageous when you’re nothing.”
The waiter comes to take our main orders. Houellebecq selects a beef tartare, and I go for steak, medium rare. My guest wants me to choose the red. I say I don’t know anything about wine. “One has to know,” he admonishes. The waiter suggests a bottle of Château Lalande Cabardès, a spicy and fruity blend of Syrah, Grenache, Cabernet and Merlot that is indeed delicious.
The main dishes arrive. Both my beef and Houellebecq’s tartare come with chips and salad. The tartare is really good, he says. Does he come here often? “Never.” Why did he choose it, then? “I thought it was typical.”
In Annihilation, France is doing well economically. Does this mean he has become an optimist? “Oh no. It’s a total fantasy. I imagine two different economic futures for France, one in The Map and the Territory [a 2010 novel that won the Prix Goncourt], based on tourism and local agriculture, and the second in Annihilation, an industrial future, based on a mix of design and high tech.” The first one is more realistic, he thinks.
I mention a 2019 essay in which he called Donald Trump a good president and wonder if he will be cheering him on in this US election too. “Yes,” he says. “Trump won’t start wars,” he adds, topping up our glasses.
What if he stops supporting Ukraine? “That’s good,” Houellebecq says. But Ukrainians want to liberate their territory, I say. “What do I care? At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian,” he says. “It’s better for nature to take its course,” he adds in the spirit of might is right. “People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.”
Multiple provocations aside, in 2019 he received the Legion of Honour from President Macron for his literary output. “It was merited,” he assures me.
He started writing by noting down his dreams, a motif that appears in his latest novel. “It’s strange with dreams. You find them extremely interesting, but if you tell them to someone, they are bored. So I thought I would write them down instead.”
A woman of about 70 who has been sitting alone nearby ventures up and suddenly starts examining his fingers. “You’ve got Chopin’s hands but you write like Bartók,” she says. Houellebecq accepts the homage, though he seems a little embarrassed.
I wonder if he will ever get the Nobel Prize. “No, too many French authors have had it recently.” He finds Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio boring, but likes Patrick Modiano. As for the most recent French recipient, Annie Ernaux, he hasn’t read her.
Ernaux has said she can’t stand his depiction of women. As a woman, I must admit, it’s tricky to meet Houellebecq. He’s famous for describing us as sex objects with a sell-by date of pretty much 25. I tell him that I find this problematic — and depressing. He nearly jumps up from his chair, looking genuinely upset. “I think it’s dishonest,” he says. “All women, and really all, try to be as desirable as possible. And then when they start losing at the game, they contest the system that they were the first to uphold.”
I order an apple crumble with ice cream. Houellebecq passes on dessert, but the obliging Jérémy brings us two spoons anyway. It has a perfect balance between the sweet and the sour, the crunchy and the soft. Houellebecq doesn’t need asking twice to dig in.
“Look, I didn’t create the world,” says the 68-year-old, now married to Qianyum Lysis Li, whom he met when she was writing a thesis about his work at the Sorbonne. His wife cooks, he says, an admired female characteristic in his novels, but only dishes that he doesn’t eat. “Some vegetarian things,” he sighs. He sticks to ready-made microwave meals, like many of his characters.
He’s not working on a new book now. Once he starts, it takes him between one and two years of writing mainly late in the night, he says, downing his espresso as I sip my decaf with milk.
The admirer at the next table has written him a short letter and sends it the distance of three metres via our amiable waiter. Houellebecq reads it and puts it in his bag without comment.
The bottle of red is empty. The remains of the vanilla ice cream have turned into a melancholy soup and, after five hours, the evening is coming to a close.
I ask him if he’s happy. “No. I have some health issues that worry me.” Don’t his books bring him solace? Writing makes him forget about his life, yes. “The last time I was truly happy was when I was eight or 10,” he says of an age when “one is in harmony with the world”.
He doesn’t really like people, he sighs. Does he prefer animals? “Yes,” he concedes. “Dogs. They’re a more pleasant species.”
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