Has Michel Houellebecq gone soft?

The novelist Michel Houellebecq has repeatedly claimed that he was at his happiest in life in his first literary incarnation as a little-known troubadour poet, appearing at literary festivals and winning the attention of a small circle of enthusiasts. In a 2005 interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles he said that he views his poetry as his most accomplished work to date. “Compared to a poet, no novelist has or can ever have a style,” Houellebecq wrote in his exchange of letters with the philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy published under the title Public Enemies in 2008 – he can only work with “certain harmonies”. 

If Houellebecq’s novels can be said to have a “style”, then the closest approximation might be to Balzac’s demotic anti-style (he himself cites Balzac as a key influence), in which a weird commingling of folk tales, melodrama and proto-Gothic sensibility is married to a keen social realism to build up a rich picture of the whole sweep of 19th century experience.  

Houellebecq’s mostly blunt, affectless prose veers between abstruse sociological speculation, pornographic episodes, and compelling reflections on both high and low culture. Moments of lyricism are fleeting. 

Houellebecq’s plots are schematically identical (depressed middle-aged man slowly withdraws from the world around him until he finds himself without friends, family or loved ones THE END). In his latest novel, a depressed male protagonist, Florent-Claude Labrouste (“I hate my first name,” he admits) leaves his girlfriend and his job in Paris and goes to stay in Normandy with an old friend from university, now a farmer. He finds that he has gone to seed, his business model shattered by cheap imports and new costs imposed by diktat from Brussels. The farmers launch a series of protests which end in complete failure. Labrouste then progressively withdraws from social life until he finds himself utterly alone, without friends, family…  okay you get the picture. 

Houellebecq’s philosophical outlook is a curious synthesis of left, right, Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment ideas – at times, it’s boilerplate Marxism (he wrote in his debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte that, “economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society”). He laments the atomisation of French society and the spread of social nihilism in terms familiar to the academic affection for declinist thinking – think how many books have been published in recent years in France with titles like Illusions gauloises or Le suicide français. He is sharply critical of the legacy of the soixante-huitards – a set of viewpoints he shares with New Right thinkers like Alain Finkielkraut. 

Serotonin was marketed to the Anglophone world as Houellebecq’s Gilets Jaunes novel. It isn’t really anything of the sort (although I understand the temptation to further popularise the notion that Houellebecq is gifted with prophetic powers – his 2001 novel Plateforme culminates with a massive terror attack on a Thai beach remarkably similar to the Bali bombings). The imagery Houellebecq employs to illustrate the farmers’ protests – wasted produce piled up in village squares, sheep let loose on town halls, and tractors wheeled onto motorways to block traffic – will be familiar to anyone who has followed French politics over the past thirty years. 

His subject is really the whole development of globalisation, and although his novels take on a massive range of contemporary phenomena, the sex industry and terrorism (Plateforme), the rise in tandem of the far-right and Islamism (Soumission), genetics (Les Particules Elémentaires and La Possibilité d’une île) and the contemporary art world (La carte et le territoire), globalisation is a theme that is felt throughout – for Houellebecq, the worldwide rhythms of the market economy progressively flatten out the possibilities of life, the affective realm of desire, love and family (“I’d understood, even then, that society was a machine for destroying love,” Florent tells himself). 

In their place, consumption, and its rituals, is elevated to a state of absolute sovereignty – all that is left for the impoverished inhabitants of the West is to watch cable TV, eat ready meals and wend our way up and down the bright aisles of gigantic supermarkets. Florent relieves his boredom (“The weekends were always torture”) by subscribing to a multi-channel sports package: “I could […] follow the French, English, German, Spanish and Italian national championships, which represented a considerable number of hours of entertainment,” he says proudly. 

On encountering a massive hypermarché in Coutances, Florent finds himself “almost dizzy” at the thought of “the mobilised logistics, the vast container vessels crossing uncertain oceans”. He concludes: “Order and beauty – that was the least one could say.” 

For Houellebecq, love is predicated on the possibility of alterity, an encounter with someone, or something inexpressibly different to oneself. In Serotonin, Houellebecq writes: “I don’t think I’m mistaken comparing love to a kind of dream à deux… little games of connection and encounter.” This, he continues, is the only way “for us to transform our earthly existence into an endurable moment – the only way […] to tell the truth”. 

In an undifferentiated, hyper-globalised world, it has no value – in Les Particulaires elementaires and La Possibilité d’une île, the logic of progress leads to certain innovations in genetic science that allow humans to pass to the next stage – a neo-human world of absolute serenity, in which our bodies all look the same, in which our matterless minds embody pure reason. In this way, humanity comes to a fork – to cling to some last burst of desire, defeated and full of anguish though it might be, or to accept the inexorable logic of progress. 

In Serotonin, those grand utopian visions are substituted for an anti-depressant – “a small, white, scored oval tablet” – labelled Captorix. Florent notes: “It provides no form of happiness, or even of real relief; its action is of a different kind: by transforming life into a sequence of formalities it allows you to fool yourself.” 

For those who have never loved, it helps them pass their days in a state of ease. For Florent, however, he finds himself in a state of almost unbearable conflict. He has experienced love: “I could have made a woman happy. Well, two; I have said which ones.” The first is Kate, “probably the most intelligent person I have ever met,” and his first experience of love as “an endurable moment”. He recalls: “We could have saved the world, and we would have saved the world in the blink of an eye, in einem Augenblick, but we didn’t, or I didn’t, and love didn’t triumph; I betrayed love.” 

His life is transformed a second time by Camille: “I felt so calm, a kind of calm that I had never known before.” 

But, of course, love fails, broken by time or by error – and for Florent curdles into a kind of white-hot, pure regret: “You plunge into the past, you begin to plunge into it and then it seems as if you’re being engulfed by it, and nothing can put a limit on that engulfment.” 

In Serotonin, the past destroys the present; as surely as the onward march of progress. Whereas Les Particulaires élémentaires concludes with the epitaph “This book is dedicated to mankind”, Serotonin affords no resolution to the predicament. And that’s what sets apart Serotonin from Houellebecq’s novels to date. We can no longer be confident that humanity has the potential to evolve into a more advanced state.  

We are stuck, like Florent, consumed by this almost unendurable pain – at once to dimly perceive the value of love and to live apart from it. This sense of loss, and Houellebecq’s loss of personal conviction, seems to eat its way through the novel like a canker. The prose meanders aimlessly for several pages at a time. Several scenes seem to have been inserted into the text without any forethought, especially the episode featuring Florent’s encounter with a paedophile. Jokes repeatedly fall flat. A long excursus in which Houellebecq muses on Proust’s masturbation habits feels like an impoverished copy of the caustic anti-canonical attacks of his previous novels: “We are a long way from Wuthering Heights to say the least,” as the protagonist of Extension du domaine de la lutte brilliantly puts it. At times, it doesn’t even read like a particularly interesting or relevant critique of globalisation.  

In Serotonin, all these typically Houellebecqian touches fall away – and the only portions of text that bear any resemblance to his “certain harmonies” are his reflections on love, and the death of love. They make this novel worth reading and re-reading for their astonishing luminosity and brutality. There are those who have “nothing to regret”, Houellebecq writes: “I am not in that situation.”