It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. As the country plunges into a contentious presidential race, the government falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks in which videos of brutal decapitations and skillfully crafted deepfakes proliferate on the web. Paul Raison's own troubles are bound up with those of the country. He is an adviser to the finance minister; his wife, Prudence, is a Treasury official; and his father, Édouard, now retired, spent his career in the security services. Paul, badly overworked, is facing the threat of separation from his wife. When his father suddenly suffers a stroke, Paul must depart Paris for his provincial hometown, where he and his siblings now have the opportunity to repair their strained relationships with Édouard as they determine to free him from the decrepit public nursing home where he is wasting away.
His fiction is brainier, trickier and more stimulating than his polarizing reputation suggests ... Slow getting started and too diffuse by half — I began skipping the boring dream sequences ... Houellebecq is such a sly and ambiguous writer that I’m not always sure when he’s kidding. I often identify with his characters, and even when I find certain pages repellent, Houellebecq challenges my perceptions. He gets me asking whether I’m in touch with my real self, or whether I’ve unthinkingly donned a set of attitudes passed on by our culture.
Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch ... Houellebecq ambles through Paul’s and Bruno’s bell-jar lives and political maneuverings at a languorous pace, but enlivens the narrative with irrupting counternarratives ... Ponders and meanders ... I trust his sarcasm, more than his mysticism, to free us.
It gets off to a slow start, so slow that I debated abandoning my copy on a subway seat so that it could depress another passenger. That seemed cruel and random, so I hung on and finished it ... Tedious and disengaged ... Slack ... As if Houellebecq’s heart were not in it. There are many failed epigrams. He’s an arsonist who has lost his matches.
