More than a century after his death, Joris-Karl Huysmans, best known for his novel “À Rebours,” has found a modern soul mate in the form of another French novelist, Michel Houellebecq.

Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 handbook of decadence, “À Rebours,” tells the story of a nature-hating aesthete named Jean des Esseintes. Subtitled “A Novel Without a Plot,” the narrative concerns des Esseintes’s attempts to furnish and decorate a country home where he will be able to live without ever again having to deal with the outside world. “Refined to the point of malady,” des Esseintes is thrown into “excruciating agony” by merely brushing up against someone in the street. The smell of certain flowers is enough to make him faint in revulsion. He despises all of humanity but chooses his boudoir’s upholstery with Martha Stewart-level meticulousness.

Des Esseintes locks himself away with a library containing the strangest books ever written, plus enough sensual distractions to outfit Xanadu’s pleasure dome. Instead of finding happiness, he nearly loses his mind. Doctors order him to return to Paris and start behaving like a normal person. “But I don’t enjoy what other people enjoy,” he protests. He has no friends in the capital, or anywhere else. He’s not just anti-social; he’s absolutely alone. His only options are suicide or God. The end.

Des Esseintes was a stand-in for Huysmans, a neuralgic misfit who converted to Christianity after writing “À Rebours.” Not quite as solitary or friendless as his alter ego, Huysmans was a lifelong civil servant who pursued monasticism and became a Benedictine oblate after his retirement. The persistent theme of his books is humankind’s unending stupidity—l'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité. He wanted nothing more than to flee “the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines of thought.”

More than a century after his death, he has found a soul mate in the form of Michel Houellebecq, who himself is among the more misanthropic literary figures of this or any age. “I think he could've been a real friend to me,” Houellebecq commented in one of his last interviews before going into police protection following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in January. Houellebecq’s new novel, “Submission,” was published in France on the day of the murders; he also happened to be on the cover of the issue of Charlie Hebdo then on newsstands.

François, the novel’s protagonist, considers Huysmans his B.F.F. “Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him,” François tells us, in the book’s opening line. He is an academic who specializes in Huysmans; other than his favorite author, he has no close relationships at all. He’s so distant from his parents that they only enter his thoughts at their deaths; he attends neither of their funerals.

François’s fictional life trajectory mirrors Huysmans’s actual life: dismal living conditions, a tedious job situation, a serviceable imagination, a modicum of success, a proclivity for prostitutes, and, finally, a resigned acceptance of faith. And just as Huysmans put himself into des Esseintes, François is a self-caricature by Houellebecq—with a twist, or, rather, two: François is Houellebecq’s version of himself if he lived Huysmans’s life, in the year 2022.

Houellebecq and Huysmans have much in common, beginning with their ability to infuriate readers. “There’s a general furore!” Huysmans wrote when “À Rebours” was released. “I’ve trodden on everyone’s corns.” Houellebecq, for his part, has enraged, among others, feminists, Muslims, and the Prime Minister of France. There is more to these two writers than mere provocations, however. Huysmans wrote during the rise of laïcité (French secularism), in the Third Republic, when religion was excised from public life. Houellebecq says he is chronicling religion’s return to European politics today. They each have a twisted outlook on the sacred.

Huysmans was a skeptic who wanted to believe. Houellebecq isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s read the Koran and is no longer calling Islam “the stupidest” of all religions, as he did in 2001. The main impetus behind “Submission,” he has said, is his recent renunciation of atheism and acceptance of agnosticism: “When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.” The most crucial passage in the book, according to Houellebecq, occurs at the sanctuary of Rocamadour, where François has an intimation of a mystical experience, and then immediately convinces himself it wasn’t real: “maybe I was just hungry.” He wishes he could share Huysmans’s compulsive appetite for transcendence.

In “À Rebours,” Huysmans gave expression to that appetite in a very particular way: des Esseintes channels his “aspirations towards an unknown universe” into material acquisitions and the pursuit of perfect pleasure. He is basically attempting a form of sensual monasticism, combining the terrestrial with the ethereal in the most lurid ways conceivable. Similarly, François takes freedom to its microwavable-dinner limits, and finds only despair—and, in the end, Islam. Throughout his career as a professor, the only interest he takes in his students is the possibility of sleeping with those who are attractive and female. His pattern is to break up with a woman once he has slept with her, out of weariness, and then keep having attachment-free sex. As he grows older, he becomes depressed by all his pseudo-girlfriends—except for one, Myriam, a twenty-two-year old Louise Brooks-alike who, on his forty-fourth birthday, gives him such physical pleasure that he nearly passes out. When France votes in a Muslim government, she and her Jewish parents move to Israel. She sends him photos. “I wanted to touch her ass so badly my hands tingled with pain,” François says. They talk on the phone a few times and then she dumps him via e-mail.

Des Esseintes has a more complicated dynamic with members of the opposite sex. He seems to be impotent, but he still has needs. He’s the sort of dandy for whom “it is only the impossible, the unachievable that arouses desire.” For instance, he gets turned on by locomotive engines: their steaming, sweating loins girdled in glittering copper corsets; their disheveled manes of black smoke; their horns’ muffled, impassioned cries. (Huysmans himself claimed to possess no qualities that could possibly attract a woman; his closest love was a seamstress named Anna Meunier, with whom he had an on-again, off-again thing until she was hospitalized in a mental asylum, where she died two years later.)

When Des Esseintes hooks up with a ventriloquist, one of their early date nights consists of him lying next to her on his divan while she projects her voice into a black-marble sphinx and a statuette of a chimera. She animates the two monsters according to his painstaking instructions, projecting lines from “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” into their mouths. When the chimera utters the phrase, “New perfumes I seek, stranger flowers I seek, pleasures not yet discovered,” des Esseintes breaks into sobs and holds onto his ventriloquist like an inconsolable child.

Houellebecq, on the other hand, positions François as having fantasies typical of a modern man: he likes to watch YouPorn. At one of his more suicidal moments, he has a threesome with two escorts in their early twenties. To the accompaniment of dulcet whale songs, he halfheartedly sodomizes them, feeling, at first, no joy at all. But then they begin to pleasure him just so, and he remembers what it is to be happy: “Little by little, with growing amazement, I felt shivers of forgotten pleasure.” François briefly wonders if he might even develop feelings for one of them, a Moroccan woman named Rachida. Alas, the “miracle” of that first encounter is not repeated.