Divisive, yet intriguing
Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq
There is a story about an old Oxford don being called out for his attitude to women. ‘‘But why settle for misogyny,’’ he replied, ‘‘when I can have misanthropy?’’ The line kept coming back to me as I made my way through Serotonin, the latest book by Michel Houellebecq, a French writer who has been plausibly accused of just about every prejudice available.
With his persistent focus on women as very little more than sex objects, misogyny looms large, but so too do homophobia (casual), racism (general) and, above all, Islamophobia (topical). On the positive side, he is an animal welfare activist, so there’s that. The shtick is that, in combination, these show a kind of egalitarian misanthropy. Houellebecq does not cut his middle-class, middle-aged male, straight and white ‘‘heroes’’ any slack, so why should he go easy on anyone else? And his controversiality is, of course, all part of his appeal. Last year, he was awarded the inaugural Oswald Spengler Prize and took advantage of his acceptance speech to suggest that it was not so much the decline of the West that worried him, as its ‘‘suicide’’.
The theme is one that Serotonin embodies literally in its hero, 46-year-old agronomist Florent-Claude, as he embarks on a suicidal farewell tour of his life and loves, against the backdrop of a present-day France being slowly throttled by ‘‘ineluctable’’ globalisation. And yet, there is something to Serotonin. Florent-Claude’s inability to react within normal moral bounds is fairly juvenile as a dig at bourgeois sensibilities, but works well as an evocation of his depression.
A fictional antidepressant called Captorix has transformed his life into a ‘‘sequence of formalities’’, placed the world behind a thick muffling film whose sole purpose is to help him ‘‘at least to not die – for a certain period of time’’. Beneath the film, the very flatness of FlorentClaude’s voice and reactions becomes compelling. Houellebecq is, in the final instance, just interesting enough a novelist to make it work. Whether or not you agree with his views, he remains an astute commentator on the contemporary political fracas.