Both of the novels I've read by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised and this one, contain a lot of sex. "Serious" novelists are notorious for being unable to write a sex scene -- Updike's stuff, of which I've only seen excerpts, comes to mind -- because of the danger of unintentional hilarity, among other things. Houellebecq's sex scenes are entirely matter-of-fact, graphic, slightly pornographic, and yet utterly serious. He also sprinkes through the text philosophical aphorisms and disquisitions on culture, religion, and politics. His tone is slightly bemused, world-weary, and frank. The whole effect is enormously entertaining.
An example: "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing." Or: "It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable." No one I know of is writing with this energy in English, except maybe Geoff Dyer.
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