America is funny about writers. When it comes to her homegrown novelists, she ignores them in favor of topical clickbait nattering (sometimes even the novelists’ own nattering). When it comes to European writers, however, we prefer a sample of their thoughts in fictional form over the most sparkling essay.
To wit: most of the Alt-Right and even half of the Left in the States has now heard of Michel Houellebecq, author of the cautionary novel Submission, in which he satirizes a possible ‘soft takeover’ of a ridiculously apathetic France by Islamists. Submission was released January 7, 2015—the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings—and Houellebecq was caricatured on the cover of that week’s Charlie, which may have helped his cause. Rarely does a novelist have the luck to be so perfectly, if macabrely, newsworthy.
However, Houellebecq is only one-third of the unholy trinity of anti-Leftist intellectuals who’ve made it their duty to disturb the French bobo-gentsia. His essay-writing brethren—Alain Finkielkraut and Éric Zemmour—get short shrift this side of the pond. Zemmour’s 2014 bestseller, Le Suicide Francais, has yet to be translated into English, though it moved 5,000 copies a day for the first two weeks after its release.
As for longtime intello Finkielkraut, precious little of what he has written since he abandoned the Left in disgust has appeared in English; dear me, what a coincidence. A former soixante-huitard (which means ’68’er, which is to say a hippie—or, as I prefer to say, soixante-retard), Finkielkraut slowly turned toward the Right over the years as his comrades grew more ridiculous.
Finally, all hell broke loose when he released last year’s L’Identité malheureuse—a gentle and subtle argument for French identitarianism. Notably, Finkielkraut is the progeniture of an earlier wave of immigration, back when France still expected immigrants to become culturally French. But neither his Jewish-Polish background (off to the races, tinfoil-hat brigade!— a Jew never loves his country, which is why Finkielkraut repeatedly slaps his neck on the media chopping block for her) nor the cautious, reasoned tone of the book slowed the hip young press in their race to fling ideological offal at him. Like their counterparts in the U.S., France’s youthful media establishment proudly fancy themselves rebels when they attack the old and dispossessed.
More a philosopher than a politico—even if, as Le Figaro recently noted, he’s often denigrated as a populist—Finkielkraut usually seems bemused when he’s called a Nazi. But he seems to be getting less patient of late.
Finkielkraut’s new book, La Seule exactitude, was released in France a few weeks before the recent Paris attacks; I only last week received my copy via Kindle in the States, since apparently the ocean Intertubes are slow this time of year. Before the Friday the 13th attacks, the French press, having already forgotten that they’re all Charlie, tore Finkielkraut apart for trying to warn against filling the country with people who hate the natives.
