Book Review: Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Book Review Submission 

by Michel Houellebecq

Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 2015

pp 247

University Professor Francois is approaching the thick of middle age while the Islamic world encroaches on the French Liberal Body Politic. Women are wearing burqas, alcohol is prohibited (except for the Islamic elite), and all men are encouraged to have multiple wives, the younger the better. Francois will soon lose his job at the New Sorbonne University, unless he submits to the new reigning Islamic order. He must profess his loyalty to Allah. Complete Submission.

Submission is a complicated rendering of what happens to a liberal culture when it is suppressed by an orthodox, reactionary leadership. It could happen to any nation or to any culture at any time. It has already happened in America. Instead of an Islamic ruling class, America is beset by a White Christian Nationalist leadership that is intent on squashing civil liberties, liberal thinking, and any trace of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI).

Houellebecq deftly interweaves the unfolding of political events with the drama of Francois’s personal and professional life. Francoise has a numbingly dull preoccupation with his penis but “required bodies that were firm, supple, and flawless.” Francois holds women to be responsible for the quality of his erections and casts mean aspersions upon women who have sloppy asses. He wants to nail women, i.e., his young students, “before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive, and condemned her to lasting solitude.”  

Francois is a renowned expert on the work of the French novelist and art critic J.K. Huysmans, who had once famously declared, “I am good for nothing.” Francois has much in common with J.K. Huysmans. He, too, is good for nothing. Francois’ thesis (dissertation) about J.K Huysmans is 788 pages, took seven years of his life, and might be his only accomplishment. Francois is trapped in Academia, a pitiful bastion of misogyny and mediocrity, the academic equivalent of jock rot.  Houellebecq quotes historian Arnold Toynbee, who asserted “that civilizations don’t die by murder but by suicide.” The tawdry presentation of Academia in Submission confirms Toynbee’s point: it is indeed a world that is killing itself.