This glass is totally empty

IT’S not easy to write when you suspect language of betrayal -- and “Greed,” Elfriede Jelinek’s latest novel to be published in English (despite her 2004 Nobel Prize for literature, she remains little known outside Austria), is not easy to read. Her style operates as a kind of peremptory defense, brazenly using cliches and tropes and flooding the page with words. She spins her story from digressions on everything from speed guns to gardening to contemporary Austrian politics, using asides, puns and double-entendres to move from one to the next. Sentences end miles from where they began; paragraphs go on for pages.

“I for example have nothing to say faced with the figures I create,” the narrator says, “bring on the stock phrases and some more, and another and another, until they squirm beneath me with pain or perhaps also because they’ve too little space.” Buried somewhere in the avalanche lies a plot. If you manage to dig out (not a sure thing), it’s hard not to appreciate the scope of the devastation.

Kurt Janisch is a country policeman and running fanatic who lusts after other people’s houses -- a modern-day fascist in everything but name. “From such people we should learn to obey the state, without them needing to waste any manners on us,” the narrator tells us. “When they kick down our doors because we’re black or have worked in the black economy, we’re harvested and only then cut by the neighbors. A policeman is always right.”

Among the dozens of spinsters whom Janisch stops for traffic violations -- with the intent of extorting their property -- is Gerti, a woman of modest accomplishment. Janisch seduces Gerti to get to her house, and she lets him in immediately, because “above all the single, disappointed ladies in their middle years immediately give the key to themselves to anyone.” Janisch, always on the prowl, prefers to force his way inside, in every literal and figurative way imaginable.

Hunter beware: What’s always true for women -- who inevitably “turn from hunter to hunted” -- is sometimes true for men too. When Janisch briefly loses his sense of domination, he responds like a cornered animal.

When the body of a pretty 16-year-old girl, wrapped in tarpaulin, bobs to the surface of a lake, this sleepy Austrian skiing town is roiled with intrigue (much of it gleefully invented by the townspeople, “because it would have been so much more interesting”).

All of this suggests a thriller, which the novel is not. Despite the hyperkinetic quality of Jelinek’s writing, there’s little tension animating the story. The only mystery here is where the writhing sentences will end up. Perplexing moments are the result of baffling prose, not calculated suspense. There’s only one possible culprit here even though everyone’s a villain at heart. The characters think and act robotically; the only constraint to their limbic systems is society’s rigidity.

This is the dubious achievement of “Greed”: It empties humans of their humanity, until they’re just shells, or, to use Jelinek’s preferred image, empty houses. Janisch, she writes, is “clean and empty. The furniture has been pushed against the wall.” Gerti -- sometimes identified with the narrator (“the woman and I, are we one? We are not yet at one,” the narrator playfully says) -- is oppressed but not sympathetic, despite her “love” for the country policeman. Even the teenage victim’s boyfriend, originally tender, comes to think of her as a “component” that has “unfortunately broken down.” Nature is likewise artificial: The gray ribbon of an asphalt road is indistinct from a river, and a man-made lake looks more like gelatin than water.

“Greed” lacks the energy and grotesque spontaneity of Jelinek’s most famous work, “The Piano Teacher,” and even of “Lust,” with its perverse sexuality. There is sadism here too, and raw, often brutal descriptions of sex, but they seem strangely like an afterthought. Greed’s perverting power is so great, Jelinek seems to suggest, that men don’t even act like beasts anymore -- they’re too busy thinking about bricks and plaster. There are moments of wry humor (for example: “Only with death and the Olympic games is taking part all that is required”), and one eerie, wondrous description of a moose arching through the air after Janisch’s car has struck it. But, for the most part, the book is a dense mass of words with a hollow core. That the core is meant to seem hollow doesn’t make it feel any less so.

At one point, Jelinek comes close to pinning the problem -- and offering, possibly, a glimmer of hope for redemption. Janisch, she writes, “completely lacks a whole dimension, that is, the dimension that there are other people apart from himself.” In Jelinek’s unfailingly grim worldview, most people lack this dimension and view each other through a distorting lens. But perhaps, if the obscuring landscape is scorched clean, we can learn to see each other anew.

Don’t hold your breath. Ultimately, Jelinek is simply nihilistic: “Everything appears dreary and empty to people, a watery, an ice desert, a motorway on which a ghost driver is getting ready to transform the isolation, the little people existence of the living