French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, 2019’s Serotonin, practically dared the reader to abandon it. Bitter, bigoted narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste sprayed venom in all directions, but reserved the worst for his near-silent, spectacularly unfaithful Japanese wife – a woman whose infidelities extended not only to entire roomfuls of men, but at one point to a roomful of dogs.
Repugnant though much of this material was, Houellebecq dredged from the sewage a novel of unexpected poignancy. Burning off its fury in the heat of its first half, Serotonin evolved in its closing passages into a work of elegiac, alienated grief, albeit one that retained, in its daring psychological excavation of the then-nascent gilets jaunes movement, Houellebecq’s sharp eye for contemporary cultural fissures.
