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

"Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content." So begins the article Maupassant published in Gil Blas on À rebours. In general, literary history has been hard on Naturalism. Huysmans was celebrated for having thrown off its yoke, and yet Maupassant's article is much deeper and more sensitive than the article by Bloy that appeared at the same time in Le Chat Noir. Even Zola's objections make sense, on rereading: it is true that, psychologically, Jean des Esseintes remains unchanged from the first page to the last; that nothing happens, or can happen, in the book; that it has, in a sense, no plot. It is also true that there was no way for Huysmans to take À rebours any further than he did. His masterpiece was a dead end—but isn't that true of any masterpiece? After a book like that, Huysmans had no choice but to part ways with Naturalism. This is all that Zola notices. Maupassant, the greater artist, grasped that it was a masterpiece. I laid out these ideas in a short article for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, which, for the several days it took me to write it, was much more engaging than the electoral campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.

She must have made a ravishing little goth as a teenager, not so long ago, and she had grown into a very classy young woman, with her bobbed black hair, her very white skin, and her dark eyes. Classy, but quietly sexy. And she more than lived up to her promise of discreet sexuality. For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, and no one had ever given me more pleasure than Myriam. She could contract her pussy at will (sometimes softly, with a slow, irresistible pressure; sometimes in sharp, rebellious little tugs); when she gave me her little ass, she swiveled it around with infinite grace. As for her blow jobs, I'd never encountered anything like them. She approached each one as if it were her first, and would be her last. Any single one of them would have been enough to justify a man's existence.

I ended up calling her, once I'd spent a few more days wondering whether I should. We agreed to meet that very evening.

We continue to use tu with our ex-girlfriends, that's the custom, but we kiss them on the cheeks and not the lips. Myriam wore a short black skirt and black tights. I'd invited her to my place. I didn't really want to go to a restaurant. She had an inquisitive look around the room and sat back on the sofa. Her skirt really was extremely short and she'd put on makeup. I offered her a drink. Bourbon, she said, if you have it.

"Something's different…" She took a sip. "But I can't tell what."

"The curtains." I had installed double drapes, orange and ocher with a vaguely ethnic motif. I'd also bought a throw for the couch.

She turned around, kneeling on the sofa to examine the curtains. "Pretty," she decided. "Very pretty, actually. But then, you always did have good taste—for such a macho man." She turned to face me. "You don't mind me calling you macho, do you?"

"I don't know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I've never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we're used to it now—but was it really a good idea?"

Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realized I had no answer, to this question or any other.

"So you're for a return to patriarchy?"

"You know I'm not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren't enough children, so we're finished."

Copyright © 2015 by Michel Houellebecq and Flammarion

Translation copyright © 2015 by Lorin Stein