Michel Houellebecq's latest novel is almost respectable, writes Tymon Smith

'I've become a symbol of so many unpleasant things - cynicism, nihilism, misogyny," said France's most famous living novelist, Michel Houellebecq, in a 2010 interview with The Paris Review.

At the time Houellebecq was the author of four novels, each more controversial than the last, each selling more copies than its predecessors and each increasing his popularity with international audiences while reducing his popularity with critics in his native France, for whom success is an anathema to importance.

Houellebecq did little to discourage the idea created of him in the French press, choosing to live in Ireland and Spain, giving fewer and fewer interviews and never failing to deliver at least one provocative statement in those he did. All of which, has, as Houellebecq was lamenting at the time of the interview, very little to do with his work.

Described by critic Paul Berman as "depressive lucidity", Houellebecq's work is usually about a cast of sad characters caught in the alienating gears of modern life's grinding demands. But, at the same time, they are able to perceive things with a clarity lacking in their optimistic, fundamentalist peers.

Believing that "the moral character of people is set, fixed until death", and choosing to see himself as a "realist who exaggerates a little", Houellebecq's latest novel - a scathing satire of French intellectual society, and a murder mystery - also displays a humanist tenderness and grapples with the inevitability of death.

"It isn't exactly true that I'm a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn't think, just to shock. I try to say what I think."

In the character of good-looking, internationally successful artist Jed Martin, Houellebecq has created a cipher for his less cynical impulses. For while Jed finds much of the world around him perplexing and impenetrable, he isn't filled with the rage of previous protagonists. This is perhaps why it was easy for the judges of France's premier literary prize, the Prix Goncourt - who have passed Houellebecq over in previous years - to declare The Map and the Territory the winner of the prize in 2010.

Jed's artistic interests begin with the photographing of industrial objects, move to photographs of Michelin road maps and then lead to international success. He paints portraits such as "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto"; and a portrait of his father leaving his architecture practice on his last day of work.

Along the way, Martin falls in love with a beautiful Russian woman named Olga who works for Michelin - and then, through his own neuroses, loses her. He befriends the novelist Michel Houllebecq, who he approaches to write a piece for a catalogue of his work, becomes embroiled in a murder investigation and learns to come to terms with his father's approaching demise.

All of which doesn't really help explain what it is that's so impressive about The Map and Territory - for it has always been in the pondering between plot points that Houllebecq has done his best work, dismissing modern art as "overpriced furniture", pondering the possibility of creating a thriller about radiators and giving us a fictional version of himself that plays on the duality of his self-image and that created of him in the press.

On the surface, the book may be more respectable than his previous work, but The Map and the Territory is a logical progression for Houllebecq as an author and affirms his affinity for Balzac's "very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He's exaggerating in an amusing way. But that's what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalisation of values."

And no, that's not the statement of a reactionary - it's merely the thought of a man who calls it as he sees it.

• The Map and the Territory, published by Heinemann, R215