Ross Douthat generously links and responds to my review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission, so it behooves me to return the favor. Douthat’s one bone to pick with my own read is as follows:

Millman loses me when he suggests that this satire on Houellebecq’s own desires is somehow incompatible with the novel also being a satire of the Western elite writ large:

… even if we attribute to [the West’s consciously multiculturally-minded liberal elite] a kind of unacknowledged subconscious yearning for an old-time patriarchal masculinity, this novel does not particularly indulge that yearning—because the men we meet are as far as possible from those types. François does not learn how to be a “real man” from Islam, the Islamic regime simply bestows upon him a new social position, as it has done for an even less likely candidate for transformation whom François meets at a party, an elderly and socially awkward professor who would never have been able to marry under the old sexual dispensation. Even the social-climbing head of François’s department, a character named Rediger who is clearly intended to be a kind of Mephistophelean figure, is more of a dandy than a man’s man and he has done nothing to seduce his teenage bride. She’s simply trained gigglingly to obey.

But why can’t Houellebecq’s point be precisely that the actualsubconscious desire of Western man, liberal man, late-modern man is not really to somehow return to a true patriarchy, where you have to shoulder real burdens as the price of your authority, but rather to just play-act patriarchy with a giggling child bride or three while still drawing a government salary and living in a rent-stabilized apartment in a safe modern city? What can’t be he just be saying that many liberal men are themselves pathetically Houellebecqian, except without his self-awareness about their actual desires?

His suggestion, I think, isn’t that the modern enlightened adult male secretly “liking” teenage bikini pics on Instagram somehow contains, buried deep within himself, the soul of Saladin the Great. It’s that this pathetic excuse for a man could be effectively bought off, in the event of an actual cultural upheaval, by a regime that bestowed the illusion of real manhood (along with a comfortable sinecure) in a way that the present mix of official gender egalitarianism and internet fantasias do not.

That actually sounds pretty right to me – and inasmuch as I felt it didn’t really work as satire of the French or, more generally, Western elite, it’s because the whole book is such a smooth, glib glide. If he’s suggesting that the rest of elite France is Houellebecquian, only unconscious of it, he’d be more convincing if there were any actual characters to perform the function of being Houellebecquian while being unconscious of it. But there aren’t really any actual characters in the book other than François, the author-surrogate – and the various pseudo-characters endorse his neoreactionary read of events rather than disputing it. That’s why I said it felt like a pundit’s idea of a novel.

But I certainly agree with this:

“Submission” is as interesting for what isn’t recognizable about its vision as for what is. You don’t have to share the author’s dark view of late modernity to at least recognize the European society that he’s mocking, the types he’s ridiculing (himself included), the kind of decadence that he portrays as the West’s essential lot. But it’s noteworthy that while he only needs to exaggerate reality to make our own society seem ripe for some sort of submission, he needs to turn to a pure fantasy — one that’s not even detailed enough to be described as Orientalist — in order to envision how that submission might actually be imposed or brought about.

Which is, to harp again on an old theme of mine, the striking thing about our era in human history: There’s enough decadence in the West to make a fall or change imaginable, but it’s very hard, even for a novelist, to breath real life and plausibility into the alternative idea or way of life that might (in the near term) conquer or supplant our own.

It’s almost enough to make one wonder whether fretting about decadence isn’t part of the essential condition of modernity, unrelated to actual material conditions. Which does appear to be the case: after all, western intellectuals have been fretting about this at least since the Edwardian Age.