The French novelist Michel Houellebecq is a longtime friend of controversy, which has done at least as much as critical praise to sell his books. In the Book Review in 2000, Anthony Quinn called his novel “The Elementary Particles” a “bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile” book, the tone of which “lurches unpleasantly between the salacious and the psychotic.”
Earlier this month, Houellebecq engaged in a pugnacious interview in The Paris Review about his latest novel, “Submission,” recently published in French. The book imagines France in 2022, when a Muslim political party has won the presidency. That event results in women leaving the workplace, among other social changes.
Asked if he was trafficking in “the politics of fear,” Houellebecq said: “Yes, the book has a scary side. I use scare tactics.” But he followed that with: “Actually, it’s not clear what we are meant to be afraid of, nativists or Muslims. I leave that unresolved.”
The interview provoked widespread reaction, much of it negative. The novelist Hari Kunzru wrote on Twitter: “Houellebecq’s new Muslim-takeover-of-France novel sounds truly terrible.”
The morning this column was written, an attack at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, suspected to have been carried out by Islamic militants, left at least 12 people dead. A caricature of Houellebecq had been on the magazine’s most recent cover, and his publisher’s offices were being guarded in the aftermath of the murders.
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