The French writer Michel Houellebecq is one of the two or three most important novelists alive today. His works are cynical, depressing, crudely pornographic, misogynist, racist, and politically reactionary. They are also repetitive: Each of his seven novels, beginning with 1994’s Whatever, features a caustic, sex-obsessed, middle-aged narrator brooding over the impossibility of love, the inevitability of death, and the overall pointlessness of life; transhumanism, sex tourism, and the decline of European civilization are all recurring themes. Yet despite Houellebecq’s unpleasantness, his books contain a visionary and often brutally funny critique of life in the sexually liberated West, which he depicts as a cruel Darwinian struggle in which the young and beautiful lord their natural advantages over the old and the ugly, and everyone ultimately dies alone.
Houellebecq’s latest novel, Serotonin, published in the United States on Nov. 19, is true to form. Its narrator and authorial stand-in, Florent-Claude Labrouste, is a depressed 46-year-old misanthrope. When we meet him, he is stuck in a loveless relationship with a Japanese woman 20 years his junior and working a well-paid but pointless job at the French Ministry of Agriculture. He passes his days drinking, fantasizing about the young hippie women he encounters near his vacation home in Spain, and contemplating suicide. When he finds that his girlfriend has been unfaithful (to put it mildly), he resolves to disappear. He quits his job, moves into a hotel room, and visits a doctor, who prescribes him an antidepressant. Within the space of a few days, he has cut himself completely loose of the world.
Florent’s antidepressants allow him to get through the day without killing himself, but they also eliminate his sex drive, and with it, any remaining hope of happiness. Finding himself “essentially deprived of reasons to live and of reasons to die,” Florent decides to embark on a “farewell ceremony” for his libido and his life. He returns to rural Normandy to tour the countryside where, as a young man, he had briefly lived with the love of his life, and to visit his one remaining friend, a struggling aristocratic farmer named Aymeric. Here he learns that Aymeric, too, has been defeated: His wife has taken the children and run off with a “London queer” he hired to fix his piano, and his efforts to run his farm without GMOs or heavy industrial machinery have left him nearly bankrupt, unable to compete with agricultural imports from the developing world. Aymeric now spends his time getting blind drunk, polishing his assault rifle, and planning violent protests against the government.
Florent’s narrative of this farewell tour is interwoven with reminiscences about his own young adulthood, and in particular, his love affairs with two women, Kate and Camille. Neither woman rises to the level of a three-dimensional character, but they are — unusually for Houellebecq — depicted with something like real affection. His novels have always combined ruthless pessimism with sentimentality about love, but it is usually Houellebecq’s women who sabotage relationships, whether through careerism or promiscuity. Here, it is Florent — his inability to control his own appetites and, above all, his decidedly unmasculine passivity — who is unambiguously at fault. Both relationships fell apart as a result of his cheating, and his great regret is not having had the courage to ask Camille to forsake her career and become his wife: “I wasn’t formatted for such a proposition,” he explains. “I was a modern man, and for me, like for all of my contemporaries, a woman’s professional career was something that had to be respected above all else.” As he dives into his past, his remorse over this failure grows more and more intense, eventually threatening to drive him insane.
Some reviews of Serotonin (which has been out in France since Jan. 4) have suggested that it is an anti-European Union parable or a novel of the yellow vest protests, which erupted in France last November. But while it is true that Aymeric’s fate can be read as an indictment of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, Houellebecq’s real subject in Serotonin is the same as it was in his previous novel, 2015’s Submission: the exhaustion of European civilization. In Submission, France’s governing classes consent to an Islamist takeover to prevent a victory by the nativist right. The narrator, after flirting with the far-right and considering a conversion to Catholicism, ultimately accepts the new order — superficially in order to taste the joys of polygamy, but at a deeper level because he thinks European culture is too old and sterile to survive. The Islamists, for all their flaws, have enough self-belief to lead, and their institution of medieval gender roles will at least ensure that people reproduce at the literal, biological level.
In Serotonin, this theme is more muted, refracted through the memories of one lonely Frenchman rather than staged as an epic clash between Europe and Islam. But the conclusion is the same. Florent’s drug-induced torpor is meant to stand-in for what Houellebecq sees as the condition of the West as a whole: passive, tired, and neutered. “That’s how a civilization dies,” he says, reflecting on his inability to settle down with a woman. “Without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilization just dies of weariness, of self-disgust.” Near the end of the novel, Florent finally hatches a plan to win back Camille. But it requires him to commit an act of violence so gruesome that he shrinks from it, resigning himself instead to isolation and decline. It is a metaphor for Houellebecq’s politics writ large: The present may be bleak and future even bleaker, but we can’t turn back the clock.
Serotonin is not a great novel. It is more melancholic and less bitter than some of Houellebecq’s other books, at the cost of being less entertaining. The plot drags in places, and it lacks the mordant humor that typically redeems the author’s pessimism. Yet the book ends on a curiously hopeful note, with a gesture toward the idea that love between men and women is an “illumination” of God’s “instructions” for our lives. This religious touch may represent a new direction for Houellebecq, a spark of light amid his relentless darkness. Or, given his generally cynical take on romantic love, it may turn out to be his blackest joke of all.
Park MacDougald is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
