The French Exception

If you are a diligent reader of the novels flowing out of the Anglosphere for the last five or ten years, there are a number of reasons why French literary culture might strike you as rather strange. First, French writers seem to be unusually responsive to current events: while we were all writing our neat little autofictions about that time someone was mean to us in our MFA program, Michel Houellebecq was concocting terrorist attacks and farmers’ rebellions with such sociological acuity that one or two of them actually came true.