And some of its themes will be familiar to fans: On the first page, François is finishing school, and he “realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me.” As it is for everyone Houellebecq character. And, later:

You have to take an interest in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model airplanes.

My afternoon seminar was exhausting. Doctoral students tended to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on France 2.

Most of us take an interest in something instinctively, almost automatically; meaning is a question but not the only one, and if the Indian dinner matters we at least want a good one. The condition of a Houellebecq narrator is boredom punctuated by sex with an improbably attractive woman or an unexpected act of violence. Despite that most of his novels, except for The Possibility of an Island, rivet: He asks questions others may ask but answers in ways few others will. Different but not in a bad way is a small territory that feels expansive in his books, which are an unpassionate redescription of life in the age of pleasure, which so few columnists get. Tom Wolfe gets status; Houellebecq gets apathy.