Sérotonine

Sérotonine is a treatise on decline, addressing the decay of the West, the European Union, France, and God. The hero — or anti-hero — Florent-Claude Labrouste, is a forty-six-year-old agricultural engineer employed by the Ministry of Agriculture, in a relationship with a twenty-six-year-old Japanese woman, who is dying “of sorrow” and owes his survival to a drug, Captorix, which stimulates the production of serotonin, a “hormone linked to self-esteem,” defined from the incipit: “It is a small white oval tablet, scored down the middle.”

He decides to disappear. First to a Mercure hotel near Place d’Italie, then to Basse-Normandie, “an abandoned territory, populated by suicidal farmers condemned by Brussels’ European policy.”

Houellebecq, the writer of contemporary man’s solitude, keeps hammering the same nail with obstinacy, even at the cost of simplifying, admitting as much: “yes, I’m simplifying, but one must simplify or nothing gets done.” Houellebecq thus reveals his intention: “Had we been in a romantic comedy, I would have done this […]. Had we been in a porn film the sequel would have been even more predictable […]. We were in reality, and so, I went home.” A relentless, disillusioned machine.