The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’
There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust. The Dutch get it early and twice from the narrator of Serotonin — ‘a race of opportunist polyglot people’.‘Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best.’ The narrator of Serotonin is a typical creation of the author, which is to say essentially indistinguishable from Michel Houellebecq.
Florent-Claude Labrouste is a man in his late forties whose parents have killed themselves in a suicide pact. He dislikes his name, has no friends, works in the Ministry of Agriculture and hates Paris, where he lives. Mentioning his diesel 4×4 he says: ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’
His girlfriend, for whom he feels nothing but disgust and contempt, is Japanese. He discovers that she has been cheating on him in orgies, though is neither surprised nor even bothered by the extremity of the details. Finally he chooses to leave her, resign from his job, walk out of his rented flat and do something else. ‘Clearing my office took me a little under ten minutes.
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