Serotonin

Adoration and hatred meet Michel Houellebecq’s new novel with equal intensity. “Rat poison,” rages one critic; “prophetic,” praise others. Evidently, the international bestseller Serotonin strikes a raw nerve in the present moment: an aging, white, heterosexual man – Florent, an agricultural engineer – draws final consequences. He leaves behind his broken life as part of a couple, stages his disappearance – with no alternative life plan. A new drug that stimulates serotonin release and keeps him from slipping into a bottomless depression allows him to embark on one last journey in his diesel SUV – though condemned to impotence, a side effect.

He travels through rural France and the winding paths of his memory, revisiting three women with whom he might have shared a life. Along the way, he reunites with Aymeric, his old aristocratic friend from university, who has become the leader of a modern farmers’ revolt – a rebellion of abandoned men, the losers of EU agricultural policy and social change.

Houellebecq’s protagonist is marked by a courageous embrace of the ridiculous, but his life story is also a book about love and the agonizing question of whether happiness is still possible – without sarcasm – and a furious political pamphlet.