Thu, Oct 15, 2015 page11

• Book review: The casual provocateur

  Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, now translated into English, imagines France under its first Muslim president

  • By Rachel Donadio / NY Times News Service
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  Michel Houellebecq was seated cross-legged in a chair in his publishers’ office here, chain-smoking and flicking away criticism that his latest novel, Submission, is Islamophobic, or at least critical of Islam. “I really couldn’t care less, to be honest,” said Houellebecq, France’s best-known world-weary bad-boy novelist, letting out a little laugh that interrupted his usual deadpan delivery.

  Islam itself doesn’t interest him, he continued during a recent interview before the novel’s release in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “What interests me is the fear that it creates, not the contents,” he said.

  Submission, which is set in 2022 and imagines France under its first Muslim president, was published in France on Jan. 7, the day jihadists killed 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, whose cover that week featured Houellebecq (pronounced WELL-beck) in a magician’s hat, as if predicting the future.

  Since then, he has been under 24-hour police protection, a fate that, he dryly said, “could be worse.” Among those killed was his friend the economist Bernard Maris. “It’s the first time someone I knew died for political reasons,” he added. Of the attack on the publication, he said, “I was sad, but I wasn’t surprised.”

  A best seller across Europe, Submission hit a nerve in France, where it has sold an impressive 650,000 copies. Literary critics praised it. Feminists condemned its depiction of women (supine, in all senses of the word, including in not standing up to the imposition of Shariah law). The right called it prescient. The left called it a gift to the right-wing National Front. Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced it, saying: “France isn’t Michel Houellebecq. It isn’t intolerance, hate, fear.” In August, France’s establishment dailies, Le Figaro and Le Monde, published five- and six-part series on him.

  Such intense attention is probably not likely in the US, where literary fiction and talk-radio politics rarely overlap, and where the blows of terrorism — the Sept. 11 attacks, the beheadings of Americans in the Middle East by the Islamic State — are not as fresh as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor as close to home.

  In the US, Submission may be considered more as what it is: satirical fiction. Because of all the polemics in France, “the French have not yet been able to see the book as a work of literature,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of history at Columbia, who reviewed the French edition of the novel in The New York Review of Books in April. “I’m curious to see how Anglophone audiences respond to it simply as a novel.”

  Beyond his tangles with Islam, Houellebecq is best known for his affectless demeanor, his exploration of the collateral damage of the narcissism of the 1960s, and his scathing depiction of contemporary French anomie. During a three-hour interview in French that covered religion, politics, literature and sex, he often seemed to be playing a parody of himself, as in the French pseudo-documentary last year, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. He alternated between Silk Cut cigarettes, biting into them below the filter, and drags on electronic cigarettes. At one point, an assistant asked if he wanted a beer, but he declined. (Most interviews with this author involve several bottles of alcohol.)

  Asked what posed the greatest threat in France today, radical Islam, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, all of which are thriving, Houellebecq said, “It depends for whom.”

  “Anti-Semitism is a derivation of Islamic radicalism,” he said, and it’s mostly the Islamic radicals who are on the attack. “Islamophobia is a defensive reaction, one of fear, which is justified.”

  Assertions like this have made Houellebecq a darling of the French right, but Submission is less a call to arms or a prophecy than a subtle excoriation of French middle-class conformism. “It’s not reality; it’s the French view of reality,” said the novelist Marc Weitzmann, who, as literary editor of an influential French weekly, helped make Houellebecq’s career in the 1990s. “His real subject is how the French think.”

  In Submission, the head of a fictional Muslim Brotherhood party allies with the Socialists to defeat the National Front, led in the novel — as in reality — by Marine Le Pen. Crime drops, the economy improves, Shariah law arrives, polygamy becomes legal, and women have to wear the veil and are encouraged to stay home and make babies. The protagonist’s Jewish girlfriend emigrates to Israel.

  The book’s title is a play on the literal meaning of the word Islam, and also suggests the docility with which France 2022 accepts the new order. Submission is a novel of ideas, the ideas being that France and Europe are in decline, and that Roman Catholicism is dying, if not already dead, but Islam is alive; in the book’s view, since the Cold War, no one in France — besides Muslims — have found any larger political ideals to believe in.

  In his review, Lilla called the book a “dystopian conversion novel.” At a crucial moment, Francois, the novel’s protagonist and a Sorbonne professor, visits a Catholic shrine hoping to have a conversion experience like that of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the 19th-century French novelist who is the subject of his research, only to find himself unmoved.

  “Islam is easier,” Houellebecq said in the interview. “Looking at a church, a Romanesque church in particular, and looking attentively at the statues, we don’t understand. We don’t understand what the nature of this faith was. It’s very exotic. It seems more exotic to us than Islam.” As the novel ends, Francois is poised to convert to Islam, although Houellebecq said he had left ambiguous whether he does.

  Submission seems to ask whether Islam is compatible with France’s republican values. Does Houellebecq think that it is? “Catholicism isn’t compatible with France’s republican values,” he said. “Catholicism lost against the republican idea of France.” Today, he said, Islam has more of a chance to take hold in society.

  In spite of the news media attention generated by his books and his provocations, Houellebecq has been an outsider in France’s cozy, mandarin literary world. He nonetheless won the country’s highest literary prize, the Goncourt, in 2010, for his novel The Map and the Territory, which is about an artist and has a clever plot device in which Houellebecq becomes a character.

  With the ever-present threat of terrorism, Houellebecq said he had never lived through a more troubling moment in France. “The situation is getting worse,” he said.

  He didn’t seem too concerned. It was a lovely Paris evening. Two plainclothes officers walked him from the publishers’ office onto the street. He slung a backpack over one shoulder. Is he working on another novel? “No,” he said, “I’m tired.” All afternoon, he had played the role of Michel Houellebecq to perfection.
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