The narrator travels to Rouen with a male colleague named Tisserand in order to conduct training for the ministry staff there.
Tisserand tries to become friendly with an attractive female student in a train to Rouen, two "cuties" at the ministry, and several women in a restaurant and a café, but with no success.
He reflects that psychoanalysis turned her into a woman with a complete lack of moral sense and that "he regrets not taking a knife to her ovaries".
The couple go to the sand dunes to have sex, and Tisserand follows them, holding the steak knife the narrator has given him.
The narrator admits himself into a rest home where he observes the other patients and concludes that they are not at all deranged but merely lacking in love.
[2] Carole Sweeney states that a major theme is the "disaggregating effects of post-Fordism on the intimate spaces of human affect"[3] The novel is also a satire on late-twentieth century work culture and consumer society.
[4] According to Sweeney, "For the new middle management information class in Whatever society is the comfortable frictionless round of eating ready meals, paying bills on time, attending dutiful work farewell parties, buying beds and CDs..."[5] Morrey states that the novel may be considered a type of roman à thèse (thesis novel).
"[7] Adam Kirsch of The New York Times has called the character Tisserand a "proto-incel" and states that the novel predicted the modern incel movement.
[9] Morrey identifies a theme of "depressive lucidity" in the face of the struggle against the rules of modern society.
According to Morrey, "he too feels sorry for his fellow humans but there is nothing he can do...The consequence of Houellebecq’s (narrators’) depressive lucidity, in other words, is a chronic inability to act.
Morrey, however, states that Houellebecq's frequent use of "sudden exclamations, dark ironies, hyperbole and hysterical outbursts" distinguish the tone from Camus'.