Excerpt from Submission by Michel Houellebecq, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But that was all over now. My entire youth was over. Soon (very soon), I would have to see about entering the workforce. The prospect left me cold.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time. Still, it's harmless, and can even have a certain marginal value. A young woman applying for a sales job at Céline or Hermès should naturally attend to her appearance above all; but a degree in literature can constitute a secondary asset, since it guarantees the employer, in the absence of any useful skills, a certain intellectual agility that could lead to professional development—besides which, literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

For my part, I knew I was one of those "gifted" few. I'd written a good dissertation and I expected an honorable mention. Yet to my surprise I received a special commendation, and I was even more surprised when I saw the committee's report, which was excellent, practically dithyrambic. Suddenly a tenured position as a senior lecturer was within my reach, if I wanted it. Which meant that my boring, predictable life continued to resemble Huysmans's a century and a half before. I had begun my adult life at a university and would probably end it the same way, maybe even at the same one (though in fact this wasn't quite the case: I had taken my degree at the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne and was hired by Paris III, slightly less prestigious but also in the Fifth Arrondissement, right around the corner).

I'd never felt the slightest vocation for teaching—and my fifteen years as a teacher had only confirmed that initial lack of vocation. What little private tutoring I'd done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality. Worse, maybe, I didn't like young people and never had, even when I might have been numbered among them. Being young implied, it seemed to me, a certain enthusiasm for life, or else a certain defiance, accompanied in either case by a vague sense of superiority toward the generation that one had been called on to replace. I'd never had those sorts of feelings. I did have some friends when I was young—or, more precisely, there were other students with whom I could contemplate having coffee or a beer between classes and not feel disgust. Mostly I had mistresses—or rather, as people said then (and maybe still do), I had girlfriends, roughly one a year. These relationships followed a fairly regular pattern. They would start at the beginning of the school year, with a seminar, an exchange of class notes, or what have you—one of the many social occasions, so common in student life, that disappear when we enter the workforce, plunging most of us into a solitude as stupefying as it is radical. The relationship would take its course as the year went by. Nights were spent at one person's place or the other's (in fact, I'd usually stay at theirs, since the grim, not to say insalubrious, atmosphere at mine hardly lent itself to romantic interludes); sexual acts took place (to what I like to think was our mutual satisfaction). When we came back from summer vacation and the school year began again, the relationship would end, almost always at the girl's initiative.Things had changed over the summer. This was the reason they'd give, usually without elaboration. A few, clearly less eager to spare me, would explain that they had met someone. Yeah, and so? Wasn't I someone, too? In hindsight, these factual accounts strike me as insufficient. I don't doubt that they had indeed met someone; but what made them lend so much weight to this encounter—enough to end our relationship and involve them in a new one—was merely the application of a powerful but unspoken model of amorous behavior, a model all the more powerful because it remained unspoken.

Copyright © 2015 by Michel Houellebecq and Flammarion

Translation copyright © 2015 by Lorin Stein