“Submission” has been called anti-Islam, but France is the real object of its scorn. Photograph by François Berthier / Contour by Getty

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has become a literary “case” to be reprimanded as much as an author to be read, and his new novel, “Soumission,” or “Submission,” shows why. The book, which will be published in English by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is shaped by a simple idea. In France in the very near future, the respectable republican parties fragment the vote in a multiparty election, and the two top vote-getters are Marine Le Pen, of the extreme right, and one Mohammed Ben Abbes, the fictive leader of a French Muslim Brotherhood. In the runoff, the French left backs the Muslim, preferring the devil it doesn’t know to the one it does. Ben Abbes’s government soon imposes a kind of relaxed Sharia law throughout France and—this is the book’s central joke and point—the French élite are cravenly eager to collaborate with the new regime, delighted not only to convert but to submit to a bracing and self-assured authoritarianism. Like the oversophisticated Hellenists in Cavafy’s poem, they have been secretly waiting for the barbarians all their lives.

Houellebecq is one of those writers who cause critics to panic, since placing him is tricky. He is probably the most famous French novelist of his generation. An immediately recognizable caricature of Houellebecq as a wannabe Nostradamus was the image on the last issue of Charlie Hebdo before the attack on its staff. But he is not a particularly graceful stylist, and it exasperates French writers who are to see him made so much of outside France, not to mention within it. Though he began as a poet, he doesn’t have much poetic grip, nor are his choices and phrases of a kind that make other writers envious. (One well-known French critic has pointed out, tartly, that no good writer would ever confuse, as Houellebecq does in the new novel, the French word for “vineyard” with the French word for “vintage.”) Yet it is a mistake to think of him as a provocateur, in the manner of authors who purposefully set out to goad and annoy as many people as they can with each new book, like Gore Vidal, or, for that matter, Céline.

Houellebecq is, simply, a satirist. He likes to take what’s happening now and imagine what would happen if it kept on happening. That’s what satirists do. Jonathan Swift saw that the English were treating the Irish as animals; what if they took the next natural step and ate their babies? Orwell, with less humor, imagined what would happen if life in Britain remained, for forty years, at the depressed level of the BBC cafeteria as it was in 1948, and added some Stalinist accessories. Huxley, in “Brave New World,” took the logic of a hedonistic and scientific society to its farthest outcome, a place where pleasure would be all and passion unknown. This kind of satire impresses us most when the imaginative extrapolation intersects an unexpected example—when it suddenly comes close enough to fit. (As when Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared as living proof of Philip K. Dick’s prescience about the merger of American politics and the wilder shores of its entertainments, achieved by people with funny names.)

In the novel that made Houellebecq famous, “Les Particules Élémentaires” (1998), he proposed that a society with an unchecked devotion to economic liberalism and erotic libertinism would come to a daylong oscillation between fucking and finance, where bankers would literally break their backs in the act of having sex for the hundredth time that day. The satire seemed ridiculously heavy-handed and overwrought—and then came Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, who, in the brief time before dining with his daughter and boarding a plane, turned out to have budgeted fifteen minutes for sex (coerced or not) with a total stranger. D.S.K. was a character only Houellebecq could have imagined, and already had.

Houellebecq is not merely a satirist but—more unusually—a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind. He doesn’t “delight in depicting our follies,” as reviewers like to say; he’s made miserable by them. French reviews and American previews of “Submission” might leave one with the impression of a sardonic, teeth-baring polemic about the evils of Islam, the absurdities of feminism, the terrible demoralization of French life. In truth, the tone of the book is melancholic rather than polemical. Life makes Houellebecq blue. “The totality of animals, the crushing majority of men, live without ever finding the least need for justification,” his narrator, a literature professor at the Sorbonne, reflects. “They live because they live, and that’s all, and that’s how they reason—and then I suppose they die because they die, and this, in their eyes, ends the analysis.” That’s Houellebecq’s typical tone; the book’s virtues lie in his mordant, disabused eye for depressing details of French life.

Even if, sentence by sentence, Houellebecq is not a writer to envy, certainly he does have a voice of his own, one of slightly resigned sociological detachment. In the very first pages of the new book, he remarks, apropos the uses of a university degree in literature, that “a young woman applying for a job as a saleswoman at Céline or Hermès will, in the first place, have to take care of her appearance, but a literature degree could constitute a secondary attribute pleasing to the employer, suggesting a certain intellectual agility that might indicate a potential evolution of her career—literature, in place of useful skills, still has a positive connotation in the domain of the luxury industry.” You master Proust to become a better salesgirl, and what else would you expect? The commodification of the world and the art and the people in it leaves Houellebecq unexcited.

This flattened tone seems, at first, like an affectation. But, reading “Public Enemies,” a collection of confessional letters exchanged by Houellebecq and the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, one realizes that it’s not an affectation at all. It’s an affect. It tells a truth about Houellebecq’s own disconcerted sense of detachment from human relations. He is, after all, a man whose mother wrote a bitter memoir about him, insisting that her son should say, “I am a liar, I am an impostor, I was a parasite, all I’ve done in my life is harm the people around me. And I ask forgiveness”—and it seems fair to say that, when your mom writes the bitter memoir, something really has gone screwy in your emotional life. His heroes always seem truly puzzled by the emotional rewards that other men claim to get from children and work and family and even sex.

Anhedonic in the extreme, Houellebecq finds the conventional pleasure-seeking surface of French life entirely absurd, which is one reason he satirizes it so effectively. He can be very funny about the details of modern sex—his protagonists find the objective, clinical details underwhelming—and is fearless in admitting to his own inspection of them, as in this description from a moment of Internet porn: “The penis passed from one mouth to the other, the tongues crossing like flights of swallows, lightly troubled, in the somber sky . . . when they are ready to leave Europe for their winter pilgrimage.” The parodic note, neither contemptuous nor indignant but preternaturally calm, is distinctively Houellebecq’s.