A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France’s most famous living literary figure It’s 2022. François is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famed nineteenth-century novelist associated with the Decadent movement. But François’s own decadence is of considerably smaller scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, and watches YouPorn. Meanwhile, it’s election season, and in an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power—and Islamic law is instituted. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on the condition that he converts to Islam. A darkly comic masterpiece from one of France’s great writers, Submission by Michel Houellebecq has become an international sensation and one of the most discussed novels of our time.

Satire is always such a tricky beast. I'm not sure any book we've read in NUBClub was so sharply divided between those who hated it and those who loved it. At the heart of the controversy was the misogyny at work in Houellebecq's imagining of an Islamic France that effectively enabled the men who remained to take multiple wives and silence women. This was the clear object of Houellebecq's attack, perhaps best epitomized in a scene where the protagonist gets a book briefing him on the beliefs of Islam and he quickly skips all the chapters until he gets to the one about marrying a teenage bride. It's a very dark book, and some of NUBClub found it so dark and noxious to women that it was unbearable. We all certainly agreed that there were two likable characters in the book, an early love interest and student of Francois and a colleague of his at the university, both women who leave France under Islamic rule to avoid the changing climate, and beyond that, everyone is disgusting. But to those of us who enjoyed the book, that was the whole point. Houellebecq was making fun of the hypocrisy of a certain European intellectual, one who would be happy to give up freedom of thought and long held beliefs just to have sex with multiple women, and those who claim to be faithful but ignore the entire faith but the misogynist parts. Those of us who liked the book pointed to the strength and independence of the female characters as proof that Houellebecq intended us to hate Francois and the other men in the story; those who hated the book just didn't care -- the book was too dark to enjoy. We debated these facts for a while, pulling out scenes admirers thought were hilarious send-ups of political expediencies and documenting the willingness of Francois to submit (hence the title) to greater compromises in the name of power, but ultimately, you were either on board with the satire or you weren't. And that's probably the best advice that NUBClub can give about Submission. Know your tolerance for very dark, very pointed satire. If that's not your jam, Submission won't be either, but if it is, Houellebecq has a nasty little gem in this novel.