The novel is, like all of Jelinek's novels, lyrical and musical in its structure and features sexual and physical violence. "Lust" attracted a great deal of controversy upon publication, with many reviewers arguing that the novel is pornography. Critics have noted that "only first names are used to signify the characters. The deletion of the last name of the factory owner and husband Hermann, and his wife and sexual object, Gerti, demonstrates the interchangeability of the characters." The book has been described as a literary culmination of Jelinek's "aesthetics of the obscene."