Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and co-editor of The Utopian.


The publication of Michel Houellebecq?s novel Soumission on the same day as the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo was bound to make it more than just another book. It quickly became the best-selling novel in France, and it?s already hogging bookstore windows across the Continent. Many early European critics treated the novel, which imagines a moderate Muslim political party taking power through an election in France, as yet another Islamophobic tract. But in fact the book was something different ? and much more strange.

As is often the case with novels that are too hot to touch in the land of their birth, it?s the critics who have read the book from a distance who have written the finest pieces. In The New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla sees Soumission as the latest installment in a special genre of European cultural despair: He places Houellebecq alongside the Mann of The Magic Mountain and the Musil of The Man Without Qualities. ?Houellebecq?s critics see the novel as anti-Muslim because they assume that individual freedom is the highest human value ? and have convinced themselves that the Islamic tradition agrees with them,? Lilla writes. ?It does not, and neither does Houellebecq.?

In The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, who read the book in Algeria, provocatively suggests that Houellebecq has gone so far as to see Islam as a kind of solution for European malaise. ?Houellebecq is not a believer himself,? Shatz writes. ?But he isn?t happy about it.? Read together, these two pieces take the temperature of European culture with stylish precision and engage the reader with a burning question: How much are you willing to pay for a world saturated with purpose and meaning?