Serotonin. Michelle Houellebecq
1.
Houellebecq’s disappointed again. Disappointment is like paper to him. Europe let America in, along with globalism and overconsumption. So Europe will appear to us as an impotent, who’s on antidepressants, who’s of upper middle class and of late middle age, and whose future has no chance to brighten up soon
As a reader, after the second novel, I may assume the main ingredients of this writer’s prose. They are: displeasure, both open and concealed, depression, pornography and vile jokes that make you feel like a bad person if you laugh at them. Poisonous remarks addressed to the peoples of the Western culture must be present as well. I.e. Germans are perverts, British are brutes and Americans are greedy cowboys. This and a lot of unnecessary letters in the last name, should help us to remember — Houellebecq’s French. ⠀
2.
Serotonin is a dystopian novel. Dystopian novels have to be uncomfortable to read. “The Trial” is unsettling with its murkiness, The Brave New World, on the contrary, discourages with its crystal clear misanthropy. “451 on Fahrenheit” upsets with the didactic tone. And 1984 is a classic “read another book” (doesn’t diminish its value though).
The world of Serotonin is one of compromises and lack of ideas. The free individual is successfully tamed, but his existential rumination is not cured. All bits of meaning are extracted from the existence, but the ultimately efficient drug Soma is not there to fill the gap, only nearly half-century old SSRIs are at our disposal.
The successfully scaled production of human meaningless suffering works without a single piece of science fiction. All the events of the novel could be passages of casual magazine articles. All the romantic stories could be the stories of friends of your friends.
This dull realism is the discomfort of Serotonin’s dystopia. At least in the way it’s presented in the book. Though it is mostly comfortable to actually live in it.
It may look as if I’m trying to put the novel into the context of books related by genre. But in fact I’m just trying to put Houellebecq into a nice company of writers from Germany, the UK and the US. It’s my idea of fun.
