Houellebecq: The Biography of a Phenomenon

Denis Demonpion

(Buchet-Chastel, 400 pages, 2019)

 Since the 1998 release of his breakthrough novel The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq has become one of the most widely read and talked about contemporary French writers at home and abroad. Some see him as a visionary with an uncanny flair for capturing the zeitgeist of our times, while others despise him as a vulgar provocateur who relishes controversy. But who really is Michel Houellebecq? Fifteen years after publishing a first, and at the time unauthorized, biography, Denis Demonpion returns to investigate the life of Michel Thomas, alias Michel Houellebecq, and help us understand this literary phenomenon.

Eager to present himself as a spontaneous genius, Houellebecq created his self-image by altering his date of birth, adopting his grandmother’s maiden name, and giving his parents up for dead, while they were still at the time alive and quite well. He attended an elite university where he obtained a degree in agricultural engineering, and went on to study filmmaking, one of his lifelong interests. Married with one child, Houellebecq eventually landed a civil servant job at The National Assembly as an IT technician. After work, he spent his time among writers and editors, slowly carving out a reputation first as a poet then as a novelist.

Houellebecq experienced rejection after rejection before Maurice Nadeau, a highly respected figure in the Parisian publishing world, took on his debut novel, Whatever, the starting point of a dazzling literary career. We travel behind the scenes of the Prix Goncourt, which Houellebecq won in 2010 for The Map and the Territory. We later navigate the thorny publication of his 2015 novel Submission, which was released the same day as the Charlie Hebdo shooting. That was not the first time reality had caught up with Houellebecq’s fiction, contributing to his reputation as a disturbing “prophet of depressing times.”

Denis Demonpion’s admiration for Michel Houellebecq the writer does not extend to Houellebecq the man. Piercingly observant, he can also be generous when it comes to relating Houellebecq’s personal trials and intimate suffering. Without departing from his caustic verve, Demonpion draws on a considerable number of unpublished documents as well the testimony of 150 people. The exclusive material and firsthand personal experiences he draws from allow him to flesh out a comprehensive portrait deserving of the complexity of his subject. For one does not have to subscribe to Houellebecq’s vision of the world to acknowledge the timeliness of his novels, and their brilliant ability to capture Western sociocultural malaise.

Denis Demonpion is a journalist and the author of critically acclaimed biographies, including Arletty (Flammarion, 1996), and most recently Salinger intime. Enquête sur l’auteur de L'Attrape-cœurs (Robert Laffont), which received the 2018 Goncourt Biography Prize.