Discussed in this essay:

Submission, by Michel Houellebecq. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256 pages. $26.

More than any of his European peers, Michel Houellebecq has benefited from the inquisitional turn in literary journalism. Since the publication of his second novel, The Elementary Particles, in 1998, each subsequent book — with the exception of The Map and the Territory (2010), a metafiction about the encounter between his authorial alter ego and a famous artist — has been subjected to numerous hostile investigations into Houellebecq’s alleged misogyny, racism, nihilism, and anticlericalism. Submission, his sixth novel, revives the charge of Islamophobia,…