“We won’t wake up, after the lockdown, in a new world,” wrote French novelist Michel Houellebecq in May 2020; “it will be the same world, but a bit worse.” This idea — the same, but worse — sums up Houellebecq’s famous pessimism. Winner of the Prix Goncourt and recipient of the Legion of Honor, Houellebecq is one of France’s most prominent and contentious writers, known for satirical novels, such as The Elementary Particles, that register his disgust with the alienation and spiritual emptiness of modern life. “I’m the writer of a nihilistic era, and of the suffering associated with nihilism,” Houellebecq says in the recently published Interventions 2020, a collection of essays, interviews, and other nonfiction, translated into English by Andrew Brown.

Early in his career, Houellebecq was often associated with the Left for his unsparing critique of neoliberal individualism, but since the turn of the century, he has become a more ambiguous figure. In 2002, a French court charged Houellebecq with inciting religious and racial hatred after he called Islam “stupid” and the Koran “badly written” (he was acquitted). More controversy came, in 2015, with the publication of Submission, about a Muslim political party turning France into an Islamic state. Houellebecq’s recent writing and statements (including his views on women) have led to some criticism from the Left. “From a young, highly lucid writer on society, Houellebecq has become a sort of cantankerous old uncle completely overwhelmed by his time,” proclaimed Les Inrockuptibles, the left-wing magazine that originally published some of the writing that appears in Interventions 2020.

Others have gone further, seeing Houellebecq as a “prophet of the far right” along the lines of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. While some of his comments are certainly — to use his own term — “stupid,” Houellebecq isn’t so easy to pigeonhole as a reactionary or crank, as this new collection shows. Interventions 2020 is an uneven book that nonetheless fleshes out our conception of a major contemporary writer, complicating the image of Houellebecq a right-winger and illuminating the pessimistic vision at the heart of his work.