In ” Française” (Knopf, 288 pages, $24.95), Jean-Paul Dubois’s new dark satire, Paul Blick’s older brother dies suddenly, a victim of a post-operative complication. On hearing the news, his mother collapses to the floor, her hands, “a pathetic bandage over her face.” It’s a pivotal moment in France, the day before the vote that ushers in the Fifth Republic, and the end of normal life for the Blick family. From the beginning, Paul Blick’s lifelong disillusionment is delineated by the epochs of the French state — “Vie Française” is a novel told in sections that correspond to the regimes of postwar France.

Much of it reads like the memoirs of its middle-aged narrator. Few scenes last longer than a page, and are spaced by lengthy explanations crowded with philosophical posturing.

At times, Mr. Dubois’s vignettes are enlivened by deftly efficient depiction. As the narrator recalls, watching his austere Roman Catholic grandmother clad in a mantilla and praying over her rosary: “Through the half-open door, I would watch her almost pray the skin off her lips.” The jaw muscles of Blick’s high-strung teenage friend David Rochas twitch “like pigeon hearts” out of neurotic sex-obsession.

A few of the humorous anecdotes are a little tired, especially to readers familiar with “Portnoy’s Complaint.” In this case, Rochas practices his adolescent pummeling on a rosbif stuffed with garlic.

We follow these stories as Blick ascends the well-worn rungs of the postwar generation. As a young man, he drifts through the carnival of post-1968 French higher education. He joins a horrendous blues cover band, flirts with political activism, and his army career lasts two days. After graduation, Blick lands a job as a sports reporter, marries the boss’s daughter, and achieves accidental success as a celebrated “tree photographer.”

Throughout, the narrator never ceases to pontificate in a gnomic and sometimes absurd way. “I see life as a solitary exercise, a journey without destination, a voyage across a lake whose waters are both calm and foul.” Elsewhere he announces, “I haven’t worn underwear since I was little. … Those superfluous garments have always bothered me, and I just don’t like the feel of them.”

Mr. Dubois’s wealthy and feckless protagonist draws comparisons to other nihilist antiheros of French literature, but his story is more ordinary. Whereas circumstances were enough to thrust a character of an earlier era, such as Celine’s Bardamu, into situations desperate and extreme, Mr. Dubois’s hardly leaves the house.

Harboring an inchoate leftism that disdains intellectuals, politicians, businessmen, and, of course, America, he takes potshots at society from the safety of his darkroom.

His wife, Anna, a businesswoman who manages a Jacuzzi company, takes a fair share of it. “Anna certainly was like the times we lived in: insolent, greedy, anxious to possess, to have, to show off, to behave as if history were truly at an end.” Indeed, Blick is a rank misogynist, for whom women are either mothers, witches, or sex objects, and for whom a homely woman is an object of derision, especially his wife’s friend Brigitte. For “consulting all sorts of beauty experts without ever managing to improve her plain face or lumpen figure,” she is cast aside in the proletariat of the dowdy and plain.

In the final act, personal tragedy strikes. As Blick is forced to contend with the arbitrariness of fortune, we pierce the marrow of Mr. Dubois’s critique of modern life. Unfortunately, we never get much depth, other than some vague complaints about the absurdity of the free market: “The whole episode allowed me to measure the futility of the modern world … loutish to the core.”

Yes, but how? Shouldn’t a nihilist be right at home amid such futility? Unfortunately, Mr. Dubois never takes us beyond a stale mixture of simplistic anti-globalism and armchair nihilism. One suspects he holds his character in too high of an esteem to prick his certainties. The novel cries out for a more concrete worldview. Blick is abandoned in the new century and disillusioned by the last, but unlike in the novels of Mr. Dubois’s ideological adversary, Michel Houellebecq, it’s not really clear why. It has something to do with French presidents.

Mr. Treneer, a writer living in Paris, last wrote for these pages on French publishing.