An award-winning author of less renown in the US, the ageing l’enfant terrible has held an unflattering mirror to the world for more than a decade. Among his many targets has been Islam – a tack that once landed him in court in his native France

In February 2001, Nicholas Lezard made Atomised by Michel Houellebecq his Guardian pick of the week. This week, in January 2015, the novelist was caught up in the terrifying events in Paris and Dammartin-en-Goële, which left 17 people dead.

Anyone unfamiliar with Houellebecq and his work – particularly in America, where he is less well known than in Europe – might consider what Lezard wrote about the Frenchman’s second novel:

This is a bold and unsettling portrait of a society falling apart: the rage that both left and right, the piously religious as well as the humanists, have expressed towards Houellebecq is pretty much the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass. There is not too much doubt that Houellebecq is an unpleasant person … One does not want to examine his ideas on race too deeply, just yet. I would get this and read it before that particular time bomb explodes.

Atomised (as Les Particules élémentaires was called in the UK) considers the contrasting drives and fates of two brothers born in the permissive 1960s who reach disillusioned adulthood at the end of the 20th century. It won awards, polarised opinion – outside France, critics such as Michiko Kakutani and Anthony Quinn loathed it, the Booker-winning novelist Julian Barnes praised it – and established Houellebecq as a central, controversial figure in French literature.

It was his second novel. He has now written six. All of them consider and condemn the absurdities and hypocrisies of modern life, using a lethal mix of satire, realism and cynicism spiced with elements of science fiction and pornography, pathos and bathos.

Houellebecq’s protagonists are male. Sex, it follows, features heavily. So does misogyny. Prominent among his targets, a proliferation which could glibly be boiled down to “everybody and everything”, are liberalism, feminism and religion. Particularly religion, and especially Islam.

Lezard’s time bomb exploded with the publication in 2001 of the follow-up to Atomised, Platform, a novel about sex tourism and terrorism in the Islamic world. For calling Islam “the most stupid of religions”, in an interview to promote the book, the author landed in court. Charged with inciting religious and racial hatred, he was acquitted.

Consistently irreverent, Houellebecq continued to stoke the flames. His fourth and perhaps slightest novel, The Possibility of an Island, considered cloning and societal collapse. His difficult relationship with his mother, which partly inspired Atomised, lurched into public view. His fifth novel, The Map and the Territory, took down the vapid world of contemporary art and, lest he seemed to be mellowing, featured the brutal murder of the author Michel Houellebecq. It won the Prix Goncourt. Developing a theme, last year he starred in a film: The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq.

Houellebecq’s new novel, Submission, takes place in 2022, in a France where for the first time the president is a Muslim. It put Houellebecq on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine which on Wednesday was attacked by Islamist terrorists, resulting in the deaths of 12 people. Houellebecq subsequently postponed promotional work and retreated to an unspecified location. Armed guards were placed at the offices of his publisher.

On Friday, the Guardian’s Steven Poole reviewed Submission, which is scheduled to be published in English in September. Poole noted Houellebecq’s usual proddings at Islam, but added:

The real target of Houellebecq’s satire, as in his previous novels, is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise.

Lezard’s reference to Caliban is still apposite. At 56, Houellebecq – famously raddled, scruffy and mumbling, a self-styled “curmudgeonly pain in the ass”, still chain-smoking despite claiming to have resorted to comfort food via a “relapse into charcuterie” – shows no sign of shying away from society’s sore spots.

• Michel Houellebecq’s Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, by Susannah Hunnewell