The novel’s French title, which translates literally as “Extension of the Domain of Struggle,” encapsulates Houellebecq’s theory of sexuality (he is typically French in his love of abstraction and theory). The sexual revolution of the 1960s, widely seen as a liberation movement, is better understood as the intrusion of capitalist values into the previously sacrosanct realm of intimate life. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism … sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization,” he writes. “Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.” The latter group — the losers — are represented in “Whatever” by Raphaël Tisserand, who is so repulsive that he has never had sex with a woman, despite strenuous efforts to seduce one. He is a proto-incel, and his story builds to a disturbing scene in which the narrator urges him to murder a woman who has rejected him.

In the end, however, Raphaël doesn’t go through with it: “Blood changes nothing,” he observes fatalistically. And this is a key difference between Houellebecq’s characters and criminals like Rodger and Minassian: They recognize that violence will not change their situation. They are victims of generational trends that Houellebecq believes have plunged the West, particularly France, into incurable misery. Houellebecq’s second (and best) book, “The Elementary Particles,” reiterates his case against “sexual liberalism,” while adding a host of new culprits, from New Age spirituality and women’s magazines to social atomization and the decline of Christianity. “In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear they had no chance,” he writes of the characters in the novel, in what could be a slogan for all his fiction.

This sounds like a familiar kind of reactionary pessimism. But it is not quite accurate to call Houellebecq a reactionary, since he does not believe that it is possible to return to the sexual regimes of the past — in particular, arranged marriages — which he suggests did a better job of providing mates for undesirable men. In his novel “Submission,” Houellebecq mischievously toys with the idea that such a return could be accomplished by a mass conversion to Islam. After all, a society in which women submit to men while men submit to the divine can be seen as Houellebecq’s version of utopia. “Screw autonomy,” his narrator muses — though he uses a more vulgar word; autonomy is the root of alienation.

In his more serious moods — as in “The Elementary Particles” or “The Possibility of an Island” — Houellebecq imagines a more radical solution to the problem of sexual inequality. Instead of going backward to an earlier stage of humanity, these books push forward to a posthuman future in which human beings are replaced by a species that has abolished sexual reproduction, and so is immune to the torments of desire and loneliness. This perfected species looks back on us as a “vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes.” Houellebecq likes to cast his novels as the testimony of the present before the court of the future: To understand why we were so wretched, posterity will have to read him.

And it is in this sense, as diagnosis and evidence, that Houellebecq’s novels are now more urgent than ever. The portrayal of hatefulness is part of fiction’s mandate to give a truthful account of the world; there are characters in Dostoyevsky as revolting as anyone in Houellebecq (perhaps more so, because Dostoyevsky is a better writer). Houellebecq is able to give such a convincing portrait of incel-thinking because at some level he seems to share its core assumption, representing sex as something that women owe men. This misogyny can make reading Houellebecq an ordeal, and he ought to be read with the suspicion and resistance that his ideas deserve. But all the same, he ought to be read.