A polarizing, provocative French novelist says he’s written his last book

A polarizing, provocative French novelist says he’s written his last book toggle caption Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Early in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, its professor hero talks about what makes a writer worth reading: “n author is above all a human being. But Houellebecq has always had one of those narrative voices that draws you in, as in this book’s opening line: “Particularly if you’re single, some Mondays in late November or early December make you feel as if you’re in death’s waiting-room.” Houellebecq’s major works — Atomized, Platform, Submission and Serotonin — were all worshiped or reviled for their seeming cynicism. Yet beneath their dryly funny, sometimes shocking surfaces, they’re the work of a radical conservative — to borrow a description Norman Mailer used of himself. “Anything can happen in life,” says the hero of Platform, “especially nothing.” No longer bound by the old religious, national and tribal belief systems, Houellebecq’s characters inhabit an atomized world whose individualism leads to the bleak consolations of technology, consumerism and the soulless sex typified by pornography.