The 18 “Immortals” of the Swedish Academy must have been unusually lavish with the aquavit during their secret ruminations to select a laureate in literature. How else, except by assuming a prolonged and hallucinatory binge, can we justify the choice of the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek as this year’s winner? The Nobel has often gone to odd or unexpected recipients. Everyone will have his or her own list of aberrations, and everyone knows that the list of those who did not receive the prize – Tolstoy, Henry James, Rilke, Joyce, Woolf, the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof, Thomas Bernhard, Yourcenar, to name but these – constitutes an honor roll of the excluded, which stands as a powerful corrective to the authority of the prize. There are writers active today who fully deserve this accolade; to stick just to the poets, what about Geoffrey Hill, easily the finest living English poet, Philippe Jaccottet of France, or Andrea Zanzotto of Italy, all incomparably more deserving than Ms. Jelinek?

A long time ago I promised myself not to get exercised about this topic. After all, I’ve had my own dark horses (Elias Canetti, for one) who did win. Still, this year’s award seems to me to represent the summit of perversity. Because Alfred Nobel stipulated that there be some “idealistic tendency” in the work of the laureates, the Swedish Academy has routinely interpreted this to mean tendencies that are decidedly left of centre. This wouldn’t matter so much if in their fiction the writers transcended their opinions, as is the cases of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jose Saramago. Mr. Saramago, after all, is a committed communist as well as a rather shameless anti-Semite, to judge from some of his recent pronouncements. But we are able to ignore this in his fiction because he aspires, in spite of himself, to some form of universality.

The same cannot be said of Ms. Jelinek. Her view of the world is exceedingly narrow and quite doctrinaire. Worse, she politicizes everything. In an interview she stated, without a trace of irony, “For me winter sports are total terrorism.” Come again? I’ve certainly been “terrorized” by both skis and snowshoes, mainly since I can’t stay upright on either, but this isn’t what Ms. Jelinek means. For her, the crowds that ac claimed Karl Schranz, the Austrian skiing champion, are no different from the crowds that acclaimed Hitler on the Heldenplatz in 1938. Even so, beyond the ideological horrors of tourism and the ski-slope – happy the country whose “terrorists” practice only the slalom! – what goes on inside picturesque Tyrolian chalets bothers Ms. Jelinek still more. Her view of sex, and of sexual relations, might cause even Andrea Dworkin to recoil. For Ms. Jelinek sex is nothing more than a brutish transaction in which the woman surrenders her body in exchange for material support; the act itself is ugly, degrading, and swinish.

This is certainly the message of her bestselling 1992 novel “Lust” (Serpent’s Tail, 207 pages; $14.99), which is a sort of updated parody of “Madame Bovary.” The protagonists, who scarcely possess personal names, are the husband, a domineering factory owner; the wife, a mute and groveling Hausfrau; and their young son, a budding miniature of his father. When the husband is not brutalizing and “poisoning” his factory workers, he is busy shagging his wife in every room of their house and in every conceivable orifice (the son watches delightedly through a keyhole). He isn’t a great proponent of foreplay, but that doesn’t matter anyway; it’s enough that he’s male.

Ms. Jelinek has no gift for depicting character nor is she interested in getting inside the heads or the hearts of her puppets. The husband is a verbal caricature, all gut and genitalia; the wife, little more than a receptacle, a “trash heap” where he “empties his dustbag” during sex. When the wife becomes involved, Emmalike, in an adulterous liaison, her lover proves as ghastly as her husband. The novel, which will not make you feel like yodeling, ends with a gang-rape and the mother’s murder of her son.

I’m all for satire and enjoy a good screed as much as the next person. But Ms. Jelinek is utterly humorless, and, worse, the ideological scaffolding of her morality play is too transparent. This is a parable about the debasing effects of capitalism, which poisons not only the lives of workers but their most intimate relations. Beyond the cartoon quality of the novel, something even uglier emerges, a loathing for the human body; the wife’s breasts are described as “big warm steaming cowpats,” and the husband’s energetic “pistol” is given every phallic euphemism in the lexicon. Oddly enough, Ms. Jelinek’s obsession with this robust organ suggests a certain sneaky admiration on the author’s part for the husband’s unquenchable lust – for the wife she has only disgust – as if the creeping toxins of late capitalism had somehow managed to insinuate them selves into the imagination of even this most doctrinaire of novelists.

Ms. Jelinek can be inventive, in her own way, and sometimes the language of her novels and plays surprises with its unexpected swerves and jolts; she weaves together slang and folk expressions with modish terms and occasionally succeeds, especially in her dramatic monologues, in zany riffs that produce an effect something like electronic music performed on an Alpenhorn. This is especially true of her play “Totenauberg” (as yet untranslated), which features the philosopher Heidegger and his lover-turned-acolyte Hannah Arendt.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this year’s Nobel prize, in my view, is that it bestows proxy laurels on a number of destructive and woolly minded thinkers, not only the kookier feminists (feminists should be repelled by Ms. Jelinek’s bleak view of women) but vacuous metaphysicians, deconstructionists, postmodernists, Lacanians, and Euro-communists, from Heidegger to Foucault and beyond. Though something of a recluse, Ms. Jelinek is the trendiest of writers and there seems to be no fad or modish cliche from which she does not glean grist for her strident mill.

In an interview Ms. Jelinek stated, “I don’t like men but I’m sexually assigned to them” (“Ich mag Manner nicht, aber ich bin sexuell auf sie angewiesen”). The choice of words is fastidious; she isn’t attracted to men but “assigned” to them, as though to a seat on a plane. Such a declaration about women would instantly disqualify any male author for a Nobel Prize. After winning the prize, Ms. Jelinek told an interviewer that she would not be attending the ceremonies in December. She doesn’t mind accepting the rewards of “late capitalism” but maybe there will just be too many men present for her comfort.