A best seller across Europe, “Submission” hit a nerve in France, where it has sold an impressive 650,000 copies. Literary critics praised it. Feminists condemned its depiction of women (supine, in all senses of the word, including in not standing up to the imposition of Shariah law). The right called it prescient. The left called it a gift to the right-wing National Front. Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced it, saying: “France isn’t Michel Houellebecq. It isn’t intolerance, hate, fear.” In August, France’s establishment dailies, Le Figaro and Le Monde, published five- and six-part series on him.

Such intense attention is probably not likely in the United States, where literary fiction and talk-radio politics rarely overlap, and where the blows of terrorism — the Sept. 11 attacks, the beheadings of Americans in the Middle East by the Islamic State — are not as fresh as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor as close to home.

In the United States, “Submission” may be considered more as what it is: satirical fiction. Because of all the polemics in France, “the French have not yet been able to see the book as a work of literature,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of history at Columbia, who reviewed the French edition of the novel in The New York Review of Books in April. “I’m curious to see how Anglophone audiences respond to it simply as a novel.”

Beyond his tangles with Islam, Mr. Houellebecq is best known for his affectless demeanor, his exploration of the collateral damage of the narcissism of the 1960s, and his scathing depiction of contemporary French anomie. During a three-hour interview in French that covered religion, politics, literature and sex, he often seemed to be playing a parody of himself, as in the 2014 French pseudo-documentary “The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq.” He alternated between Silk Cut cigarettes, biting into them below the filter, and drags on electronic cigarettes. At one point, an assistant asked if he wanted a beer, but he declined. (Most interviews with this author involve several bottles of alcohol.)

Asked what posed the greatest threat in France today, radical Islam, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, all of which are thriving, Mr. Houellebecq said, “It depends for whom.”