Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq’s novels cover a lot of territory. His approach to writing is a totalising one, offering a complex picture of contemporary society, often including its prehistory and its near or sometimes distant future. Annihilation (first published in 2022 and now available in English) bears all the hallmarks of this approach: a description of a sad dinner where two government ministers discuss their failed marriages is interrupted by digressions on the current state of the European car market and the impact of recent constitutional reforms on the upcoming presidential elections; a hospital bedside visit is punctuated by reflections on the French medical system and a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. The novel features typical Houellebecqian characters who, in the author’s words, have reached a ‘kind of standardised despair’ and ‘the deterioration of reasons for living’.

Michel Houellebecq has never been one to hide his light under a bushel. Since the publication of his second and best-known novel, Atomised, in 1998 (the same year some of the pieces included in Interventions 2020 were originally published in French), Houellebecq has established himself as the enfant terrible of French letters, primarily through his provocative and at times incendiary remarks. Indeed, there is a certain expectation that Houellebecq will live up to his reputation, something he notes in his reflections on paedophilia: ‘Through the wording of your questions, I feel I am subtly being asked to say something politically incorrect.’ Rarely does he disappoint.

Serotonin is Michel Houellebecq’s eighth novel and appears four years after the scandalous and critically successful Submission (2015), a dystopian novel that depicts France under sharia law. In Serotonin, we are again presented with the standard Houellebecquian narrator: white, middle-aged, and middle class, seemingly in the throes of some mid-life crisis of a predominantly – but not exclusively – sexual nature.