Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror by Louis Betty (review)

A pivotal moment occurs halfway through Michel Houellebecq's sixth novel, Soumission. In dire need of spiritual guidance, François travels to contemplate the Black Madonna of Rocamadour. Our protagonist experiences a fleeting moment of transcendence: 'je sentais […] mon individualité se dissoudre, au fil de mes rêveries de plus en plus prolongées devant la vierge de Rocamadour' ((Paris: Flammarion, 2015), p. 167). François, with typically Houellebecquian cynicism, is unsure if this has been genuinely religious or the result of him forgetting to eat dinner: 'il valait peut-être mieux que je rentre à l'hõtel, m'attabler devant quelques cuisses de canard, au lieu de m'effondrer entre deux bancs, victime d'une crise d'hypoglycémie mystique' (ibid., p. 169). This incident highlights a theme often overlooked in the work of France's most notorious living novelist: the unsteady relationship between the contemporary subject and a higher spiritual power. God, or more accurately the absence of God, is at the heart of Louis Betty's study, the first North American monograph to consider Houellebecq, which joins excellent volumes by Douglas Morrey (Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)) and Carole Sweeney (Michel Houellebecq and and the Literature of Despair (London: Bloomsbury 2013)). Betty's argument is clear, and offers an original perspective on Houellebecq: he is 'a deeply and unavoidably religious writer, and not to read his work religiously is to read it only partially, if not simply poorly' (p. 47). For Betty, Houellebecq's writing project is 'a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God', and sketches a tension between 'the materialism of modern science and the desire for transcendence and survival' (p. 5), which results in the 'materialist horror' of his title. The analysis opens with a close reading of Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Houellebecq's second novel, and strives to articulate the author's materialism, situating his work within contemporary re-appraisals of secularism, an important endeavour given the ongoing importance of the ambiguities of laïcité in contemporary France. Chapter 2 builds on the work of Émile Durkheim to consider how La Possibilité d'une île (2005) articulates 'questions about the definition of religion that go back to the very beginnings of sociology' (p. 51). Betty's interrogations of the status of Islam in this novel are welcome and anticipate the theme in Houellebecq's later work. Chapter 3 seeks to place Houellebecq in context with his philosophical antecedents: critics have previously explored Fourier and Comte, but Betty highlights rich links with Saint-Simon and, perhaps surprisingly, Robespierre. The final chapters draw on Houellebecq's writing on the American fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft, and Betty's reading of Pascal, to further explore the bleak experience of 'materialist horror' in the novels and provide a thoughtful reading of Soumission, which, Betty posits, uses Islam to speculate 'whether the anxieties of modernity and of individual freedom are worth the benefits they (allegedly) produce' (p. 124). This book is a timely and valuable addition to the growing critical corpus, but in treating Houellebecq on his own terms as a religious thinker ('Houellebecq is a serious writer with serious reasons for writing what he does', p. 18), Betty runs the risk of overlooking the provocative, dark humour and deep irony of his style that make the novelist such a distinctive contemporary literary voice.