Francois puzzles over his quest as an atheist to contemplate the development of Huysmans’ fictional characters converting to Catholicism. We have to assume there is some wish fulfillment going on here. Francois hungers for some kind of “divine grace," some kind of narrative of personal transformation from a beast with base appetites to a fully realized human being.
He faces another contradiction: He claims to be over with love yet he confesses he cannot let go of “the summit of his love life,” Myriam. It appears he craves love, yet has erected an egotistical barrier to convince himself otherwise. In this regard, he is somewhat like Flannery O'Connor's Misfit from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."
As he faces these contradictions, Francois sees himself as a man waiting to die. At times, he seems to suffer from genuine despair. At other times, we have to wonder if Francois wallows in his despair as a sort of self-aggrandizement.
Unable to love, unable to find distraction through politics and war, he finds himself succumbing to navel gazing. Of course, navel gazing does nothing to appease his tormented soul, but it does enrich is already tumescent egotism.
Francois looks with both longing and horror at the religious community, specifically Muslims, for their sense of faith and purpose. He grasps their shared purpose, which allows them to flourish, yet he finds their faith confining, rigid, and oppressive. “Family values” are a form of strength, but they are also a sort of prison that Francois loathes. He fears religious forces and secular forces may clash in a civil war. We see that in America with white evangelicals propping a false Messiah in authoritarian political leaders and the rest of America looking on in horror at this cult.
He finds oppression in his navel gazing, yet he finds religion to be an oppression of its own.
Francois has a lengthy discussion about multiculturalism with Godfrey Lempereur. His associate fears that extremists will eventually become the French military and that will be the end of France’s liberal democracy. Lempereur says, “Yes, if there’s going to be a general uprising anytime soon in Europe, look to Norway or Denmark, though Belgium and Holland are also zones of potential instability.”
In this regard, the novel takes up the debate about immigration. Does society benefit from diversity or do tribalistic enclaves fester and wage war upon the native citizens? This is one of the questions the novel raises.
After hearing his Lempereur’s anti-immigrant exposition, Francois is frightened and takes no comfort in contemplating his loneliness and lack of friendships, including his estrangement from his parents.
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