The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. 264 pages. $25.00

If it seems unlikely that a sexually graphic end-of-the-world morality tale could still shake up a country, consider the case of this one, which exploded onto the French cultural scene in the fall of 1998. The rare book to piss off both left and right, The Elementary Particles was condemned by the Catholic press and debated in the pages of Le Monde, France's leading daily, where former cohorts of author Michel Houellebecq (pronounced WELL-beck) publicly broke with him. That didn't stop the book from becoming a hotly-debated (losing) contestant for the prestigious Prix Goncourt Prize, or from selling 300,000 copies, or from making its author a media star. With his American debut, one longs to see whether Houellebecq — who thinks Americans are stupid, loathes democracy, admires Stalin, despises interracial dating, has an open marriage, takes his Jim Beam straight, and smokes like a chimney — will emerge as this year's paragon of political incorrectness or just another frowzy French asshole.

It's a contradictory book: philosophical and sensational, hectoring and horny — reading it is like watching porn narrated by William Bennett. Like every novel of ideas, the sermon's the thing, and what Houellebecq tells us is that the 1960s precipitated a final slide into the abyss; that hippies, drugs, free love, women's liberation and the decline of Christianity have resulted in broken families, abortions, neglect and selfishness, and that the worship of youth and beauty has led to a society where people get used up and spat out. Nothing new there, nothing all that untrue there, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another contemporary novel that wallows so freely in its own muck. Decadence is the human condition of the age, and that fact, presumably, won't change until humanity changes — not morally, but physically.

Bruno and Michel, born a couple of years apart, are the love children of a loveless mother who wandered from one commune to the next. Both boys are pawned off on grandmothers, who will die early and represent the only selfless love either child will know.

Although unaware of each other until their early teens, Bruno and Michel parallel and reflect each other. Bruno's life amounts to little more than a perfectly numbing series of public and private ejaculations, and he seems incapable of feeling anything else. Michel, a genius biologist, is so strictly cerebral he can't feel pleasure at all. Instead, he becomes increasingly absorbed in quantum theory, DNA, peptides, macromolecules, and subatomic particles, all toward developing a new theory about cloning human life. From his early days watching animals kill each other on TV, Michel has wanted to overcome nature, to have it "wiped out in holocaust." Bruno, a self-loathing victim of his own addictive personality, doesn't care for it either; "Nature? I wouldn't piss on it if it was on fire."