Review by New York Times Review
THE PATIENT WILL SEE YOU NOW: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands, by Eric Topol. (Basic Books, $17.99.) Smartphones have created the potential to shift the power dynamic between people and their doctors, allowing patients to assert more agency and control over their health care. Soon, Topol predicts, phones could routinely aid in diagnoses; grant patients greater access to their medical records; and even perform some tests - ushering in a revolution in the field. SUBMISSION, by Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Lorin Stein. (Picador, $16.) It's 2022 in France, and an Islamic party has risen to power. François, a bored literature professor, is offered an irresistible deal: a position at a prestigious university and the chance to partake of the joys of polygamy. Houellebecq's morally complex novel follows an ambivalent society losing sight of its values. MARY McGRORY: The Trailblazing Columnist Who Stood Washington on Its Head, by John Norris. (Penguin, $18.) McGrory, a longtime Nixon foe, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for her work on the Watergate scandal; in addition, her columns eulogizing John F. Kennedy and excoriating the Vietnam War are enduring monuments. As McGrory herself put it: "I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn't work for newspapers." THE VEGETARIAN, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $15.) Grisly nightmares drive Yeong-hye, an unhappy housewife in Seoul, to give up eating meat, inadvertently bringing yet more violence into her life. The ramifications of her decision, including violations of her body and mind, are explored in this novel from the perspectives of her husband, her older sister and her brother-in-law. BEYOND MEASURE: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation, by Vicki Abeles with Grace Rubenstein. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) Abeles takes aim at the standard of success in schools across the country, which too often results in students who are "enslaved to achievement." She outlines suggestions to improve educational culture and create conditions where children can thrive. FORTUNE SMILES: Stories, by Adam Johnson. (Random House, $16.) A cast of trapped narrators are the antiheroes of this collection; a man with pedophilic predilections and a former Stasi prison warden are among the characters of the book, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2015. Johnson "is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader," our reviewer, Lauren Groff, wrote. THE WASHINGTONS. George and Martha: Partners in Friendship and Love, by Flora Fraser. (Anchor, $17.95.) Fraser's biography of the couple - Martha, a wealthy widow, and George, a promising young soldier - follows them from marriage in 1759 to the White House, showing how each helped to shape the roles of presidential families to come.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Humanity didn't interest me it disgusted me, actually. So announces François, midway through best-selling, controversial French writer Houellebecq's (The Map and the Territory, 2012) latest. Ostensibly about the democratic transformation of France into an Islamic country in 2022, this is instead a study of nihilism, misogyny, and the inadequacies of humanism. While François is a successful academic, an authority on nineteenth-century author J. K. Huysmans, he thinks primarily about sex. When France turns Islamic, as a non-Muslim, he can no longer teach, so he takes early retirement. When the suave new university director offers to rehire him if he converts, François doesn't hesitate. Why? Because under the new regime, polygamy is encouraged. Hence Houellebecq's title, which is one meaning of the word Islam and a description of the attitude of François' ideal woman. Is this satire? Submission is well crafted, but the pornographic sex scenes are as tired as their rationale. Houellebecq's faltering is François' failure writ large: the inability to believe there might be any meaning in or meaningful differences between diverse points of view or ways of life.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's hard to overstate the controversy that has hounded Houellebecq's Submission since its publication in France-which coincided with the attacks on the office of Charlie Hebdo-and the persistent accusations of Islamophobia might well color the reception of the English-language translation (by Lorin Stein of the Paris Review). This would be a travesty. The novel's moral complexity, concerned above all with how politics shape-or annihilate-personal ethics, is singular and brilliant. An expert on the works of J.K. Huysmans, François is a lonely professor at a semi-prestigious Paris university; subsisting on frozen dinners and occasional sex, he is politically indifferent. Nonetheless, he is forced to take notice when the Muslim Brotherhood, under the leadership of the charismatic Mohammed Ben Abbes, comes to power in an electoral coup. François's colleagues scramble to adapt to (or resist) the now non-secular university's policies, as women are excluded from teaching and a Muslim-friendly president is installed. François travels to the monastery where Huysmans himself took refuge, knowing that if he returns to Paris, he will find a changed country. Eventually, he will have to reckon with his own convictions or join the bulk of his fellow intellectuals in convenient conversion to the new regime. This novel is not a paranoid political fantasy; it merely contains one. Houellebecq's argument becomes an investigation of the content of ideology, and he has written an indispensable, serious book that returns a long-eroded sense of consequence, immediacy, and force to contemporary literature. Agent: Francois Samuelson, Intertalent. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This latest novel from the controversial, Prix Goncourt-winning author Houellebecq (The Map and the Territory) may present as futurist/fantasy, but it's not. It begins as academic satire, with narrator François, a melancholy middle-aged Huysmans scholar, but soon turns political. In 2022, at the time of national elections, France is a volatile state; the first vote-down is canceled because of assaults on polling places, and the following week the Muslim Brotherhood is swept into power. Soon, women disappear from prominence and begin wearing veils, and polygamy-generally with "selected" wives-becomes common. Moreover, the charismatic Muslim leader Ben Abbes makes rapid progress in forging "Europe" into a Muslim entity embracing Scandinavia, the Baltics, northern Africa, etc. (the United States is barely mentioned here). François? He can have a prestigious Sorbonne appointment, but he must convert. Will he? (Hmm, prestigious position, multiple nubile wives..) This is a novel of ideas, offset by ironic humor and generally unsuccessful sex scenes. Readers will not need to be conversant with French literature and metaphysics, the philosophy/religion axis, but it's hard to see one not thus equipped getting through the narrative. VERDICT Compelling-challenging even-for readers looking for a clever book with a philosophical bent and antithetical to, or perhaps an antidote to, beach reading. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]--Robert E. Brown, -Oswego, NY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The controversial pan-European bestseller arrives in English. Houellebecq's (The Map and the Territory, 2012, etc.) newest antihero is a literature professor whose specialty is a writer few Americans and not so many modern French readers know: the pseudonymous J.-K. Huysmans, who wrote the definitive decadent novel, Au rebours, way back in the pre-Proustian, post-impressionist day. That Huysmans turns up less than a dozen words into the narrative is an important cue, for Franois is decadent, too, in the same sense that an overripe cantaloupe is, sliding irreversibly into decay and rot. So are the careerist academics around him, and so are his students, the females among whom he gladly sleeps with when he's not filling his eyes with pornography. Houellebecq's book was implicated in the Charlie Hebdo murders of Jan. 7, the day it was published in France, as an insult to Islam, and indeed Houellebecq paints with the widest brush: in order to fend off a challenge from the right, France's ruling Socialist Party comes to an accommodation with a strict Islamist political faction that accordingly rises to power and immediately fires all professors who aren't Muslim and fundamentally inclinedbut rewards converts with multiple veiled wives and salaries triple what the generous French welfare state had already been paying. Adieu Huysmans, bienvenu Al-Fatiha. Houellebecq isn't patently anti-Islamic so much as anti-everyone, a fierce moralist of an Orwellian bentand this book shares more than a few points with Nineteen Eighty-Fourwho finds us all wanting. About the only morally clean character in the book is forced out early on: "But what am I going to do in Israel?" she asks. "I don't speak a word of Hebrew. France is my country." Not anymore, Houellebecq seems to be saying, because of our softness, complacency, and the usual venalities. True, it won't make ISIS's holiday reading list, and it will offend cultural-relativist pieties. Still, though clunky and obvious, it's well worth reading as a modern work of littrature engage. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
