Serotonin (2019)
Michel Houellebecq (1956)
Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside
309 pages
In his 2015 novel Submission, French writer Michel Houellebecq imagined the intensifying present-day social and economic tensions in France leading to the rise to power in that country’s 2022 elections of a Muslim Brotherhood party that cloaks itself in moderate language and proposals, highlighted by an explicit promise to bring peace to the streets. Houellebecq implicates moderates and the left in this electoral outcome, presenting them as so beholden to an extreme and undifferentiated support for cultural diversity that they have become willing to sacrifice even the most core elements of liberal democracy at its alter – not only unwilling to forcefully condemn those who participate in violent riots, but also paranoid about appearing racist if they oppose the Muslim Brotherhood politically. Through his main character, an academic in his forties stuck in a listless, unengaged existence, Houellebecq personifies the decadence he feels has consumed French – and by extension Western – democracy.
Returning to this theme of Western decline in his new novel, Serotonin, Houellebecq again has as his protagonist a man in his mid-40’s, Florent-Claude Labrouste, a career civil servant. As the novel opens, Labrouste has sunk into a profound mid-life crisis: having undermined the promising relationships of his youth with a seemingly incorrigible hedonistic carelessness, he suddenly feels old. A decaying and loveless relationship with his latest youthful partner only reinforces the growing disgust he feels for his perceived failures, leaving him obsessing over the opportunities he has let slip by.
And neither has he found relief in his work, a series of jobs supporting agricultural policy makers at the local, federal and European community levels. Despite having had an apparently successful career analyzing agricultural policies, Labrouste has come to realize that he can only report out on the implications to French farmers of political decisions that promote globalization over local concerns, that he remains powerless to stop the dire social consequences his work details. Having recognized that the merciless logic of capitalism has created the fundamental reality that, as science write Colin Tudge notes in The Time Before History, “the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people,” Labrouste can only lament the quixotic fight French farmers wage in trying to protect their livelihoods against the powerful forces seeking profit from a globalized economy.
Fueled by his personal failures and a general hopelessness about the future, he has sunk into a deepening depression. And while the drugs he has been prescribed for it – to raise his levels of the chemical serotonin of the title – help alleviate the worst impacts of his depression, they have also severely curtailed his libido, further exacerbating his dark mood.
His sexual adventures thus limited to his imagination, he finds himself reflecting more and more on past relationships, and what and whom he has sacrificed in his pursuit of carefree pleasure. Desperate now to right his life, he sets off on a journey to resurrect some of these past relationships, seeking to find an anchor point from which to construct a more promising future for himself. His hopes are plagued by fears however: can the reunions and rehabilitations he seeks live up to his out-sized expectations for them?
Houellebecq paints a dim view of French society, and by extension the West, as on a misguided and self-inflicted path of abandoning its most fundamental and cherished values – economically through a single-minded focus on globalization that ignores local concerns and inequality, and culturally through an emphasis on diversity based on a moral relativism that considers any culture’s values as inherently valid, giving preference to each individual’s self-expression over any cultural norm. Perhaps most disturbing, however, is his implication that nothing can be done at this point to stem the tide, that the West lacks the social will to resist the decay, or at best has left the fight to destructive and xenophobic nationalist forces.
In Submission, Houellebecq’s main character eventually succumbs to the pull of the legions on the left and center who flock to the new Muslim Brotherhood regime, scared of otherwise being left socially and politically in the cold. By contrast in Serotonin, Labrouste finds himself unable to recover from a youth squandered lightly and unwilling to make peace with a socio-economic system centered on globalization, and so becomes resigned to a solitary future without hope, an existence that he can only make minimally bearable by hiding in the cloud of his anti-depressants. Craven submission or medicated self-isolation – either way, a dismal view of the West’s future.
Other reviews / information:
My review of Serotonin is linked to at left.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment