Sérotonine

Sérotonine is a treatise on decline, addressing the decline 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 grief” and owes his survival to a drug, Captorix, which stimulates the production of serotonin, a “hormone linked to self-esteem,” which he defines in the opening line: “It is a small, white, oval, scored tablet.”

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

Houellebecq, the chronicler of contemporary man’s solitude, keeps hammering the same nail, obstinately, even at the cost of oversimplifying, though he admits as much: “yes, I am simplifying, but one must simplify or nothing gets done.” Houellebecq thus reveals his intent: “Had we been in a romantic comedy, I would have acted thus […]. Had we been in a porn film, what followed would have been even more predictable […]. We were in reality, and so, I went home.” An implacable, disillusioned machine.