Path to Submission: Michel Houellebecq, Sex, History

With the 2015 publication of Submission, Michel Houellebecq became notorious. This slim novel speculated how Islamist parties might rise to power in a near-future France. The furor it caused in Europe, where the writer was already widely celebrated, crossed the pond, with the book's launch morbidly boosted by the coincident Charlie Hebdo attacks. Anxieties about the West, decadence, and migrants translated rather well to a United States getting premonitions politics were about to become very strange. As things did indeed get stranger here, and the refugee crisis worsened there, Houellebecq became not just a chronicler of the moment but was judged to be some kind of oracle, his novels raised to the status of harbingers. Thus was his latest, Serotonin, dubbed "A Novel Made for the 'Yellow Vest' Moment" by The Atlantic and scrutinized for insight into the current health of the European Union.