Atwood, by contrast, is a prolific standard-setter in the realm of “speculative fiction.” She creates dizzyingly inventive futuristic worlds only a few degrees removed from reality, and specializes in compelling female voices. Her dystopian works are inherently, but not polemically, political. Atwood, who is Canadian, wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in response to American friends in the 1980s who kept saying “It can’t happen here” as they watched the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and Asia. Clear-sighted about the worst tendencies of men (and women, too) in power, her fiction returns repeatedly to the resilience of the human spirit.

But if you seated Houellebecq and Atwood next to each other at a dinner party and he was in the mood to talk (how’s that for speculative fiction?), their new novels would supply them with a common question to debate: Could more-restrictive societies possibly point the way to more-fulfilling sexual and romantic relationships? Both take evident pleasure in concocting ingenious sociopolitical backgrounds for their thought experiments, but their real interest seems to lie in their characters’ more intimate urges and confusions.

Nan. A Talese

Atwood wrote The Heart Goes Last as a serial, and the bumpy result isn’t about to replace The Handmaid’s Tale on school reading lists. The novel opens with a young married couple, Stan and Charmaine, living in their car after a financial meltdown has wiped out jobs in the Northeast. Marauding gangs rule the streets, and an ad for a gated community called the Positron Project lures them in with guarantees of extreme security: On a rotating schedule, residents spend a month in a 1950s-style idyll of cultural conformity (no porn, no “undue” violence, mostly Doris Day movies and show tunes for entertainment) and a month as prison inmates whose work somehow (Atwood is vague on the economics) generates income to support the town.

Houellebecq develops a not-implausible electoral scenario: A charismatic Muslim Brotherhood leader forms a coalition with the Socialist Party to defeat Marine Le Pen’s National Front. But beyond the political specifics, Houellebecq’s narrator—whose melancholic pomposity has an oddly charming way of verging on self-mockery—supplies only a hazy vision of a Muslim France; women, seemingly unprompted, willingly leave the workforce when offered generous family subsidies and start covering their bodies almost overnight. With a more acutely sardonic eye, François probes the academic maneuvering at the Sorbonne. It is taken over by fabulously wealthy Saudi Arabian donors who proceed to offer male members of the faculty either a generous pension to retire or, if they convert to Islam and remain, a salary boost and polygamous family stability.

Houellebecq’s real focus, though, is on François’ preelection state of profound ennui, which primes him to consider the university’s proposal to stay on more seriously than he himself can quite believe. Given Houellebecq’s proclivity for punctuating his novels with scenes of hard-core sex (the writer Julian Barnes once described them as “curiously both pornographic and sentimental”), what stands out in Submission is François’ fixation on the mystery of how people form lasting relationships that transcend fickle desire. To be sure, the novel delivers a good dose of Houellebecq’s typical near-absurdist eroticism. Watching an online video featuring group fellatio, François notes how “the penis would pass from one mouth to the other, tongues crossing paths like restless flocks of swallows in the somber skies above the Seine-et-Marne when they prepare to leave Europe for their winter migration.” But Houellebecq reserves his parodic best to convey François’ dulled appetite for everything, from sushi to sodomy. “I kind of wanted to fuck her,” he thinks when his girlfriend comes over, “but I also kind of wanted to die.”