Michel Houellebecq's first novel, published in France in 1994 as Extension du domaine de la lutte and translated into English as Whatever, lays out the bleak thesis that would define his career: that the free market has extended its logic into intimate life, so that sexual liberation produced not freedom but a new kind of inequality. Just as economic liberalism creates winners and losers, sexual liberalism leaves some people with rich erotic lives and others with solitude and humiliation, and competition now reaches into every domain of human existence. The narrator is an unnamed thirty-year-old computer analyst at a Paris software firm who has a decent salary, no love life, a heavy smoking habit, and a sideline writing strange animal fables. He is sent with a colleague, Raphaël Tisserand, to train officials at provincial offices of the Ministry of Agriculture in Rouen and La Roche-sur-Yon. Tisserand, ugly, desperate, and perpetually rejected by women, becomes the embodiment of the narrator's theory, and the trip turns darker as the narrator, slipping into depression, goads him toward violence against a young couple. The novel's flat, clinical prose, laced with deadpan essayistic digressions, conveys a world of office routines, bad motels, and emotional emptiness. Short and corrosive, it anticipated themes that Houellebecq developed in The Elementary Particles and later novels, and it has been read as an early diagnosis of loneliness, status anxiety, and resentment in late capitalist societies. It is an essential, unsettling starting point for understanding one of contemporary Europe's most controversial writers.