Whatever

Whatever (in French, Extension du domaine de la lutte, literally "extension of the domain of struggle") is the first novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq. It was published in 1994 by Éditions Maurice Nadeau, and its Spanish translation appeared in 1999 with Anagrama. Its narrator is an unnamed computer analyst-programmer of about thirty, single and middle-class, who works for a Paris-based software company. Houellebecq refers to him throughout as "notre héros" ("our hero"). Although his professional position is secure, he regards himself as a failure in love and sex: he describes himself as unattractive and lacking charm, suffers recurring depressive episodes, and has not had sex since a breakup two years earlier.

The book is largely a narrative essay and a satire of late twentieth-century work culture and consumer society. The narrator watches from the sidelines as his contemporaries struggle daily for a little love, pleasure and money, and he argues that liberal economics has extended competition to every aspect of life. His central thesis is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s did not bring the equality it promised but instead created a capitalism of the sexual market: those who are attractive and well-resourced accumulate gratification, while those who do not fit in are relegated to a sexual underclass. The French title, with its irony, alludes to the Marxist theory of class struggle.

The structure follows the narrator through a series of settings: a dinner with a former university friend who is now a priest; a work trip to Rouen and La Roche-sur-Yon with his colleague Tisserand, a man so unattractive that he never manages to get close to a woman; and a growing drift toward isolation and despair. The narrator dwells on his former girlfriend Véronique, whom he blames for his inability to love, partly because of what he sees as the damage done by psychoanalysis, and the book includes an unsettling fantasy of violence. Tisserand comes closest to what is now called an incel, and some critics have read the novel as anticipating that phenomenon. The despair culminates in the narrator's admission to a rest home, where he concludes that the other patients are not deranged but simply lacking in love.

The novel was greeted with a mixture of scandal and admiration and helped establish Houellebecq as one of the most controversial writers in contemporary French literature. Its cold and sometimes sardonic tone has been compared to Camus's The Stranger, though Houellebecq's narrator is distinguished by sudden exclamations, dark ironies and abrupt shifts between literary and colloquial registers. In 1999 it was adapted into a film by Philippe Harel, who also wrote the screenplay and took a role in it.