The choice, presented in its basest form, is between a brutal materialist embrace of the world and a monkish retreat into the sacred. No surprise, then, why Houellebecq is so popular with certain types of religious readers. He presents the image of a godless man in a secular society in a way most flattering to the believer. His characters are pathetic, unhappy, gross, oversaturated with joyless sex, and so obviously in need not only of love but of grace. And he aggressively denies any of the normal outlets for transcendence available to the nonbeliever. The natural world is repeatedly demeaned: “nature left to its own devices generally produces nothing but a shapeless and chaotic mess, made up of various plants, and is as a whole quite ugly.” High art and culture fail to nourish the soul—as demonstrated by Florent’s takes on Mann and Proust and avant-garde theater, and by the way his erudition is matched by his moral repulsiveness. Science offers only methods for carving away at the human. And politics—a popular area for providing a sense of meaning and community—appears as a futile arena in which at best well-meaning actors delude themselves into thinking they’re more than flotsam in the broader, unchangeable currents of economic and cultural change. And though God, too, is described as an obvious mediocrity, given the state of His Creation, the end of the novel provides us with a not quite successful final chapter suggesting we do indeed have clear signs of the divinity, in “those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away—those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature.”

The end might not work as art, but Houellebecq does seem to be leading us to something like the right set of questions. Not simply “In what shall we believe?” but also “How shall we structure society such that a belief in what nourishes the human is possible?” In Houellebecq, secularism and, as Marx predicted, capitalism have taken all that once provided meaning and community and begun to dissolve it in an acid bath, leaving atomized individuals who believe themselves composed, individually, of nothing more than atoms. This picture of man, seemingly so rational, is also absurd, as is attested by the often comic efforts of materialists like Daniel Dennett and Michael Graziano to deal with the hard problem of consciousness by claiming it doesn’t exist (“the silliest claim ever made,” complained the philosopher Galen Strawson, next to which “every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.”)

“Man is a being of reason,” Houellebecq recently declared in an exchange with the conservative French journalist Geoffroy Lejeune, “but he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion.” All well and good. But then he added that the restoration of Catholicism to its former splendor—meaning twelfth-century Christians painstakingly constructing splendid Romanesque cathedrals—could repair our damaged civilization. And here we get to the danger, for the religious, of indulging too much in Houellebecq’s flattering but fundamentally nostalgic worldview, in which no progression is possible and our only hope is in a return to a past that we can’t quite believe in anymore. Such nostalgia, after all, is as much a sign of civilizational failure as any other moral monstrosity to which he draws our attention. And the movements that have periodically helped rejuvenate the church, from the revolutionary poverty and street preaching of the Franciscans to the highly intellectual missionary and educational ministry of the Jesuits, have been progressive reactions to their specific time, designed to move the church forward. Even the monasteries Houellebecq references are not really meant to be isolated spaces sealed off from the encroaching darkness. As expressed in the classic formulation of Étienne de Fougères—“the clergy pray for all, the knights defend all, the peasants labor for all”—they’re part of a complementary order of society: not simply the “organic continuum” of Aymeric’s farm but an organic and spiritual continuum binding society, in which all are implicated, true retreat is impossible, and a belief in grace entails a belief in the future, not the past.

So, by all means, read this novel. Just don’t mistake Houellebecq for a prophet.