Michel Houellebecq has a difficult job: He is a born blasphemer in an age when most of the sacred cows have been slaughtered. The traditional targets of satire – religion, patriotism, bourgeois society – still exist, and are still powerful. But among the class most likely to read serious fiction, they are not in the least bit sacrosanct. The whole modern literary tradition is dedicated to questioning them, and the whole trend of society and popular culture since the 1960s has been to neutralize their authority. As a result, ideas that seemed provocative or appalling at the beginning of the 20th century are utterly banal at the beginning of the 21st. Butler’s attack on religion, Shaw’s attack on capitalism, and Celine’s attack on patriotism may not have done away with religion, capitalism, and patriotism; but they have rendered any further such attacks infinitely less piquant.

At the beginning of his latest novel, “The Possibility of an Island” (Alfred A. Knopf, 340 pages, $24.95), Mr. Houellebecq acknowledges the difficulty of being a satirist in a liberal, tolerant, relativist society. “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality,” says his narrator and surrogate, Daniel, in ironic italics.”It was just that … so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hopes,and false aspirations; truly, there was so little left.” Yet the success of Mr.Houellebecq’s novels – they are a genuine popular success in France, and at least a succes de scandale in the English-speaking world – shows that he has an unerring aim for the few taboos that remain.

The most important of these is sex. Sex, it might seem, is the most radically disenchanted of all our former mysteries. Since the 1960s – the decade that Mr. Houellebecq blames for the West’s current ills – men and women have enjoyed a degree of sexual freedom that their ancestors would have found incomprehensible.As recently as 50 years ago, books like “Lolita” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” could be banned on the grounds of obscenity; today, they are as comfortably canonical as “Pride and Prejudice.” Before Mr. Houellebecq, it might have seemed impossible that sexual scandal could ever sell another novel.

Mr. Houellebecq’s discovery was that sexual liberation creates its own taboos, just as sexual repression once did. Those taboos, of course, no longer have to do with the depiction of sexual acts. While few nonpornographic novels include as much explicit sexual detail as Mr. Houellebecq’s, there is nothing in them that most of us haven’t seen or heard before. Characters who enjoy their sexual freedom to the utmost have lost the power to shock.

What can shock us, and does in Mr. Houellebecq’s work, are characters who do not enjoy their sexual freedom, but hate it and suffer from it. The heroes of his novels, all of them recognizably versions of the author, share a desperate, joyless sexuality, onanistic and voyeuristic, untouched by affection or intimacy. They think about sex constantly, almost exclusively, and they have it as often as they can – with uninhibited young girls if possible, with prostitutes if need be. But they almost never enjoy it, and their unhappiness throws a harsh interrogatory spotlight on our current sexual regime.

The core of what Mr. Houellebecq has to say on this subject was said, with thrilling remorselessness, in “The Elementary Particles,” published in France in 1998 and in America in 2000. In that book, the two sons of a free-loving hippie find their lives ruined by their mother’s hedonistic carelessness, which has become their culture’s as well. Bruno is miserably sex-obsessed, his lust equaled only by his misogyny. His biologist brother Michel, by contrast, is sexless, and his research finally allows him to produce a new, completely asexual human race. Only a humanity that doesn’t need to reproduce, Mr. Houellebecq suggests, can be happy.

Through Bruno’s story, in particular, Mr. Houellebecq develops the blunt, exaggerated, but still telling social critique that drives his work. Our current sexual freedom, he argues, should be understood not as emancipation, but as commodification. Sex has been demystified because it has been entirely subsumed in the system of exchange, and sexual attractiveness has become a new kind of wealth, even more arbitrarily distributed than the old.The result of all this is an “extension of the domain of struggle,” to use the title of Mr. Houellebecq’s first novel. Under our system of sexual laissez-faire, a few people have rich and varied sexual lives, while most are lonely and frustrated. Youth becomes the supreme good, while age is feared and despised.

In “The Possibility of an Island,” Mr. Houellebecq reprises all the major themes of “The Elementary Particles.” Once again we have a dirty middleaged man, obsessed with sex and bewildered by failing potency; we have the prophecy of a nonsexual future, in which science has finally solved the problem of desire; and we have Mr. Houellebecq’s rambling prose, whose clumsiness is redeemed by its bleak humor.

This time the hero is named Daniel, though his biography is Mr. Houellebecq’s, with a twist: He is a comedian, rather than a novelist, and his works are films instead of books. But like his creator, Daniel has attained a certain degree of fame by rubbing society’s face in its failures, and is now discouraged by his respectability. “All in all, I was a good professional,” he says; “I was just a bit overrated. I was not the only one.” Daniel has even had a run-in with Islamic groups, just like Mr. Houellebecq, whose last novel, “Platform,” was attacked by French Muslim groups for its insults to their religion.

When it comes to sex, Daniel is plunged in the old Houellebecqian misery. As the novel begins he is involved with Isabelle, who is beautiful, intelligent, and a good companion. Her only shortcoming is that she is getting old, but in Mr. Houellebecq’s Darwinian worldview, this is more than enough. Daniel leaves her and soon finds a replacement, a young Spanish woman named Esther, who is an unashamed caricature of male fantasy: gorgeous, sexually gifted, up for anything. But inevitably, Daniel finds that now he is the one who is too old. “In the modern world,” he recognizes, “you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo, into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.” He is doomed to be left for a younger man, just as he had left Isabelle for a younger woman.

So far, it is an ordinary enough plot, though executed with Mr. Houellebecq’s usual comic vulgarity. What makes “The Possibility of an Island”distinctive, and is sure to gain attention, is its science-fiction overlay, which deals with the fashionable subject of cloning. Daniel comes in contact with a cult known as the Elohimites, a thinly veiled version of the cloning-obsessed Raelians. Unlike their real-world counterparts, however, the Elohimites have actually discovered a way to create clones.We know this because the narrative of Daniel1, as he is called, is regularly interrupted by the narrative of Daniel25, his clone in the distant future.

In Daniel25’s chapters, Mr. Houellebecq cleverly allows us to glimpse the world the Elohimites have created. Here, humans exist only as bands of roaming savages, killing and eating one another in a landscape transformed by nuclear war and ecological devastation. Civilization survives only in the hands of the neohumans, a race of genetically engineered clones who do not need to eat, excrete, or reproduce.They live in complete solitude in guarded compounds, communicating only virtually, and devoting themselves to studying the life stories of their original ancestors. In this way, Mr. Houellebecq suggests, the neohumans of the future will solve our insoluble problems. Sex will disappear along with death, and tortures of the kind known by Daniel1 will be barely comprehensible to Daniel25.

If “The Possibility of an Island” is a more diffuse, less effective novel than “The Elementary Particles,” it is because Mr. Houellebecq relies on this vision of the future to do much fictional work.While its mechanics are sketched out in the literal-minded way typical of science fiction, Mr. Houellebecq’s dystopian future never takes on the humanly convincing fullness of Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-world in “Never Let Me Go,” to make the inevitable comparison. It remains too obviously polemical, a sexless future that serves to support Mr. Houellebecq’s critique of the hypersexualized present. That critique, as always, is what really drives his writing. The question is whether, having made it so effectively before, Mr. Houellebecq still has anything urgent left to say.

akirsch@nysun.com