I have trouble pretending that Houellebecq’s books haven’t been prophetic. Yes, he’s been vindicated in his understanding that the clashes between liberal modernity and the remaining religious conservative holdouts in the world are here to stay. Just so the West’s hand-wavey acceptance that follows these clashes. The hyper-progressive far out idea that, like, you can kind of see where these people are coming from. If you think about it.

This book came out a couple weeks before 9/11, which we will of course never forget. Submission came out a day or two before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris that caused us all, for a couple weeks, to Be Charlie. But liberal modernity wasn’t new when Houellebecq started writing. And terrorist attacks had happened in reaction to the libertine modern world many times before Houellebecq ever published a book. So at best we might say that he’s particularly attuned to these patterns in the world. At worst we might just say that he’s a lucky bigot. But I think the area where his books have really nailed down the state of the modern world isn’t their consideration of Islam’s reaction to flippant sexual liberation. It’s the tone with which his characters describe events in The Modern World.

Houellebecq writes in this sort of snow-bleached apathy where nothing is really differentiable. At one point there is a beautiful passage in this book where he describes Michael Jackson as the perfect modern celebrity and the natural result of miscegenation: he is neither white nor black, neither male nor female, neither young nor old. A sort of wildly talented cyborg for us to project ourselves onto. And if the perfect avatar of modern entertainment is a sterile yet sexually deviant cyborg, then the other markets of western exchange are similarly doomed to this regression toward the mean. A sort of wry ironic heat death.

In the same vein as Michael Jackson’s fluid treatment of boundaries, Houellebecq shows us all the countries of the western world blending into one global state. He worms our narrator through the channels of capital that permeate borders and wipe away all non-geographic differences between countries. We’re told, with a tongue pressed into a carcinogenic chain smoker’s cheek, that Thailand is the only country in Southeast Asia that was never colonized. Hooray for Thailand. For its resistance efforts, the country has been crowned the sex tourism capital of Southeast Asia, as well as one of the most successful CIA opium growing operations outside of Afghanistan. Perhaps the funniest line in this book is a direct nod to this globalizing web when the narrator is flying over Afghanistan, falling asleep from taking several sleeping pills. In a moment of characteristic but somehow lighthearted apathy, he looks out the window and thinks “the Taliban are down there. Goodnight, Talibans!”

In this novel, as in our world outside of it, differences are all broken down in capitalism’s global supermarket. Things that used to matter very much are swept away like tracings in the sand. Institutions, rules of engagement, general propriety. And is the reaction from all of Houellebecq’s characters to denounce this looting of cultural values? Hell no. In the face of the Lovecraftian horrors of the world around them—and take the racist parallels between Michel and H.P. how you want—the resounding reaction of Houellebecq’s characters is: “Huh, okay, yeah, I see what you mean. Who cares?” Depending on your outlook they come across as either Zen masters or unfeeling sociopaths. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s obsession with Eastern philosophy helps contribute to the difficulty in telling them apart. But the reactions of these characters are nothing if not understandable. At least for me.

Houellebecq writes of a world of accommodation. People who really want to sound smart might involuntarily cough up the word “hypernormalization” to describe the malaise of these characters, but I think that coining strips away how natural, almost biological, this reaction is. Houellebecq’s characters are impossible to surprise because they have tuned their instruments of meaning to the harsh noise floor of an overstimulating world. Their world, our own now, seems to demand outrage. But after enough demands of outrage things can get to the point where it’s pretty impossible to meaningfully give much of a shit about anything. That doesn’t mean we manifest a flat affect toward every element of our lives like Houellebecq’s caricatures do. But maybe we feel a correspondence with their comforting apathy when a Twitter persona or a news anchor or an older relative ask if we can BELIEVE what Trump did this time. If you shock a muscle briefly it’ll contract. But if you subject it to a current for an extended period of time, it eventually has no choice but to relax despite the stimulus. All subsequent shocks after that will fail to elicit a response. We are the silaurids that warm ourselves in the radioactive pools where we find less competition.