Book of the week: Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq has followed up Submission with a sorrowful look at France today
David Sexton
Thursday 10 January 2019
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. Sérotonine, his seventh novel, was published in France last Friday with an initial print run of 320,000 copies, and it’s out this week in German, Italian and Spanish too. Yet, laggard as ever, the English translation won’t be published until September.
Houellebecq has often shown alarming prescience in his fiction. Submission, foreseeing France submitting to Islam in 2022, was published on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015.
Since then he has foresworn interviews and publicity, although he recently published a contrarian article in Harper’s magazine calling Trump one of the best American presidents, Europe a dumb idea that has turned into a bad dream, and Brexit courageous. In the autumn, at a prize celebrating Oswald Spengler, the pessimist author of The Decline of the West, Houellebecq suggested that France wasn’t so much committing suicide as being murdered by the EU.
Sérotonine has already been hailed as a “gilets jaunes” novel before the event. In one of the key scenes despairing farmers, heavily armed, blockade an intersection of the A13 Caen-Paris motorway, torching agricultural machines — and 11 people die in an exchange of fire with the riot police.
The novel burns with anger about how French farmers are increasingly abandoning the land and being driven to suicide after being forced to match European industrial farming standards and exposed to a globalised free market. Yet this polemical component is not fully integrated with the usual Houellebecq story of an ageing white man to whom nothing matters more than lost erotic rapture.
The narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste (he detests his florid name), is yet another Houellebecq alter ego, the only child of parents who committed joint suicide, at 46 a man adrift. Like Houellebecq, he has a degree in agriculture. After initially working for the agrochemical and biotechnology company Monsanto he has joined the regional directorate of agriculture in Normandy, working on the promotion of local French cheeses.
Now, deeply depressed, Labrouste is dismantling his life, feeling that he is finished on just about every front. He breaks up with his girlfriend, a Japanese woman called Yuzu 20 years his junior, whom he has come to think of as a poisonous spider, sucking the life out of him. He quits his job and abandons his flat in Paris, holing up in a chain hotel which still has smoking rooms.
A doctor prescribes him a new-generation antidepressant called Captorix which, favouring the production of serotonin, stabilises his life to the point where he can keep himself clean and more or less functioning, but at the cost of leaving him impotent, with no libido.
We follow Labrouste’s movements over a period of weeks, as he returns to Normandy; to visit Aymeric, his best friend from college, an aristocrat and landowner who has tried to become a good farmer but, abandoned by his wife and daughters, is ruined, alcoholic and suicidal; and also to discover what became of Camille, the woman who, aged 19, was his greatest love.
The dying like to see, for one last time, the people who played a part in their lives, he observes — and so he organises what he calls “a mini-ceremony of farewells around my libido, or to put it more concretely, around my cock, as it is about to end its service; I was hoping to see all the women who had honoured it, who had loved it in their own way”. He has known love and happiness and betrayed it, deserving death for that, he tells us.
He tracks down Camille, now a country vet and single parent to a small boy, and he spies on her, aghast to discover that she has not changed at all, at 35 still possessed of the gamine allure she had when they met. They broke up, he reveals, when he had the terrible idea of screwing a black British work colleague with a great bum, and Camille caught him at it, the worst moment of his life. And that’s how he has ended up quite alone, in a hotel room, eating hummus, his sentimental life reduced to the contents of his MacBook Air.
So here’s yet another Houellebecq character, romantically insisting that, in this pitiless world, only love matters, while being focused on blowjobs and pussies. A sonorous final paragraph even invokes Christ, exasperated by the hardening of hearts.
Sérotonine reads at times dangerously close to self-parody, just another serving of Houellebecq’s now familiar style, cutting between brand names and sweeping generalisations, exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable but now perfectly stylised. Yet the anger he expresses here about the destruction of the deep France that he loves could not be more to the point, reflecting deep despair about what is happening now.
There’s no British equivalent to Houellebecq. After years of being shunned by the French establishment, he has now been fully embraced by it. On New Year’s Day, he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Just so.
Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq (Flammarion, 22 euros).
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