Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious,
raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of
Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general.
Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging
hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is
"dying of sadness." He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is
almost certainly mutual; his career is pretty much over; and he has to
keep himself thoroughly medicated to cope with day-to-day life.
Suffocating in the rampant loneliness, consumerism, hedonism, and sprawl
of the city, Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to
Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses and where he
was once in love, and even--it now seems--happy. There he finds a
countryside devastated by globalization and by European agricultural
policies, and encounters farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an
impossible return to a simpler age.
As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it
becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and of a suffering
body politic are not so different, and that all parties may be rushing
toward a catastrophe that a whole drugstore's worth of antidepressants
won't make bearable.
