Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.

By Paul W. Gleason

Michel Houellebecq might be the most brilliant and maddening French writer alive. Bleak, pessimistic, and full of black humor, his novels bear witness to “the disasters produced by the liberalization of values,” as he told the Paris Review. The sexual and economic revolutions of the 1960’s and 80’s may have promised liberation, but in Houellebecq they deliver nothing but social isolation, sexual frustration, and the depression that comes with getting older and feeling obsolete.

Houellebecq’s latest, Serotonin, takes up these themes again. Its narrator, Florent-Claude, is an aging and terminally depressed agricultural engineer who gets caught up in riots that are breaking out in rural France. Critics have credited Houellebecq with foreseeing the “yellow vests” movement. The thought of Houellebecq as a prophet is unsettling. In some of his novels humanity is either extinct or heading that way fast, mostly because of a widespread sense that there’s no good reason to keep the species going.   

Florent-Claude, is certainly having trouble seeing the point of his own life. Tired of his job promoting the agricultural products of Normandy and estranged from his current girlfriend, he drifts through his days in a stupor. As is typical of Houellebecq’s narrators, his ennui clues him in to a more general malaise. Without pleasure in sex or work, why go on? “That’s how a civilization dies,” Florent-Claude decides, “without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilization just dies of weariness, of self-disgust.”

He abandons his girlfriend in Paris without so much as a goodbye and travels to Normandy with vague plans of finding an old friend from his student days and, perhaps, reuniting with the lost love of his life, Camille. She was the one person who might have made him happy. He’s never been able to forget “that glorious infinity of shared pleasures, that I had glimpsed in Camille’s eyes.”

Without much in the way of plot, Serotonin is mostly a platform for Florent-Claude’s reminiscences and musings. Sometimes he’s funny, as when he suggests that he could raise the profile of Norman cheeses by offering them to American tourists at Omaha Beach. He makes a few astute observations about French society, too. “In France, any adult was free ‘to come and go’ – abandoning your family was not a crime,” he says. He calls this freedom “even more fundamental, and philosophically more troubling, than suicide.” In the name of personal liberty, the French can leave their families on a whim and face no more legal sanction than they would for switching to Pepsi after a lifetime of enjoying Coca-Cola. More than twelve thousand people a year exercise their freedom of choice in this way, a perfect example of what Houellebecq means by “the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.”

Florent-Claude also proves perceptive about the roots of unrest among the Norman farmers. His friend is a member of the old landed gentry, whose farm is failing because of the European Union’s free trade policies. All the other farms are failing for the exact same reason, and the farmers are angry. “I sensed a strange atmosphere around me,” says Florent-Claude, “almost ancien régime, as if 1789 had only left superficial traces.” In an all-too-familiar political dynamic, an alliance of left-behind workers and aristocrats are planning to restore the country’s former greatness.

On the whole, though, moments of insight and humor in Serotonin are too few and far between. As usual, Houellebecq devotes pages and pages to vulgar descriptions of sex, full of lines like “her arse was receptive and easy to access, and she offered it with perfect goodwill.” There are also episodes of beastiality and pedophilia, which seem calculated to shock and therefore don’t. The bigger problem is that Florent-Claude doesn’t seem interested in thinking too hard about his old relationship with Camille, why it mattered to him, and why he lost it. His mind wanders around like he himself wanders over the French countryside: never getting anywhere. He is resigned to being one of those “who leave life without thinking about it, as one leaves a holiday home that was just fine.”  

But then why bother to tell us about it? Perhaps it’s an exercise in fitting form to content. A numb and distracted narrator tells a numb and distracted story. But if so, then Houellebecq the novelist pays a price. “There are two compliments I really appreciate,” he told the Paris Review. “‘It made me weep,’ and ‘I read it in one night. I couldn’t stop.’” By these measures Serotonin falls short. It’s hard not to feel about the novel the way Florent-Claude feels about his life: it should have been better.

Still, Houellebecq is always worth reading because he confronts his readers with fundamental questions. Is selfless love possible? After a certain age, is human life worthwhile? On the evidence of Serotonin and Houellebecq’s earlier novels, his answers are “not for long” and “no.” Houellebecq’s pessimism is so deep and relentless that he seems to be taunting us, all but daring us to draw different conclusions.

All right, then. At one point Florent-Claude digresses into a discussion of end of life care. “The palliative care units,” he thinks, “are admirable people, they belong to the small and courageous contingent of ‘admirable little people’ who allow society to carry on in an otherwise generally inhuman and shitty age.” The vital word is care. Houellebecq’s novels take place in a universe almost wholly devoid of care, where love means at best “a glorious infinity of shared pleasures” and never a willingness to stay with someone, to refuse to abandon someone, even when pleasure is a distant memory and all hope is gone.    

Is the “small and courageous contingent” of caring people really as small as Florent-Claude thinks? Maybe not. The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has suggested another way of understanding the “yellow vests” movement. Instead of seeing an alliance between peasants and aristocrats, he sees a broader, pan-national revolt of the caring classes. On both sides of the Atlantic teachers, nurses, and even ambulance drivers have been “at the forefront of labor militancy” against financiers and their bureaucratic enablers. Ours can indeed feel like “a generally inhuman and shitty age,” but even Houellebecq had to admit to the Paris Review that he, like Balzac, is “exaggerating in an amusing way.”

Perhaps it’s best to understand Houellebecq as a dystopian novelist whose grim visions of the future are not technological but moral. He takes certain existing values and imagines what society would be like if only those values reigned. If the world keeps living down to his jaundiced view of it, that isn’t on him. It’s on us.

Paul W. Gleason has written reviews and essays for the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Point, and Pacific Standard. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic fellowship, he holds a PhD in religion and lives in Los Angeles."