Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review a vision of degraded masculinity

The French satirist is uniquely placed to anatomise the impotence and rage of an embittered bureaucrat

“My desire to displease masks an insane desire to please,” Michel Houellebecq wrote in Public Enemies, his epistolary exchange with the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. “But I want people to like me ‘for myself’, without trying to seduce, without hiding whatever is shameful about me.”

To some extent one reads Houellebecq precisely for his willingness to risk being loathed. The danger, amplified with every success, is that the self-shaming becomes a manner, a formula. Shock is a tricky commodity for an author to trade in over the long term, and it has to be said that the first third of his new novel, Serotonin, reads like an object lesson in the law of diminishing returns.

How to describe these crass, underpowered, chronologically bewildering opening sections? Shtick seems the best word. Wandering back and forth between 2001 and the present, they give us Florent-Claude Labrouste, a depressed bureaucrat who has just quit his job at the Ministry of Agriculture as part of a scheme to disappear – from life in general, and from his Japanese girlfriend in particular. A new anti-depressant has finally done for Labrouste’s already flagging libido, and as he faces the end of desire, he embarks on a nostalgic ramble through his life in sex, remembering and occasionally revisiting old flames and bedmates.

Female characters have never been Houellebecq’s strong point, and the ones he parades past us here have about as much human interest as a catalogue of sexbots. That’s part of the routine, of course – narrator as sad creep imprisoned in his own puerile fantasies – but it seems very old suddenly. An opening scene, with a couple of young Spanish women checking their tyre pressure at a service station while Labrouste ogles them, reads like Benny Hill doing self-parody, if such a thing can be imagined; all pumps and kneeling and hardening rubber. Then there’s Yuzu, the Japanese girlfriend, “exceptionally gifted at anal”, but unfortunately also given to videoing herself committing infidelities with multiple human and canine partners in Labrouste’s flat while he’s out at work (his discovery of the videos is reported with a mixture of lubriciousness and outrage worthy of a Victorian pornographer). One or two others seem to have been programmed with romantic as well as erotic software, including Camille, Labrouste’s Great Love, whom he has callously betrayed, and with whom he yearns to be reunited. What this friendly, almost human creature could ever have seen in the wretched Labrouste remains mysterious.

Here and there Houellebecq relaxes from this effortful brand maintenance as purveyor of smut to the intelligentsia, and muses on non-sexual aspects of human life such as gastronomy or gentrification. There are some characteristic provocations, worthy of an ill-spirited chortle or two, including a proposal to re-evaluate General Franco as a “real giant” for his contributions to the development of mass tourism (“think of Benidorm! think of Torremolinos!...”). Reactionary humour is a part of the brand too, of course. It played better when there was a liberal political consensus to act as a foil than it does under current conditions, but Houellebecq has a sociological curiosity few other novelists possess, and his more considered observations are still worth paying attention to.

A promising development in this regard is the gradual fleshing out of Labrouste’s career. Before working at the Ministry of Agriculture he was at a regional directorate with a job promoting Normandy cheeses. Heritage industry, with its uneasy mix of artisanal and marketing cultures, its shady connection to nationalism, has been a fertile subject for Houellebecq in the past (it provides the inspired ending of The Map and the Territory) and it gets him going here, too. He understands bureaucracy, and has a gift for building high-stakes drama out of seemingly mind-numbing topics such as milk quotas and EU pasteurisation rules.

At one point during his Normandy phase, Labrouste looks up an old college friend, Aymeric d’Harcourt-Olonde, the scion of an ancient family, who is attempting to farm Normandy cattle on his ancestral lands using traditional methods. At this first reunion d’Harcourt-Olonde is just about managing – kept afloat by protectionist milk quotas and (guiltily) selling off slices of land to Chinese buyers. But 15 years later the two men come together again, and this time d’Harcourt-Olonde’s dreams are falling apart. The quotas have been cut, the hand-milked herd is losing money, the chateau is crumbling around him, his wife is divorcing him, and he himself is sinking into squalor and bitterness, scraping by on the income from some shoddy bungalows while passing his time drinking, listening to 70s rock (you know things are bad when a man turns to Deep Purple for solace), and broodily polishing his guns.

By this point the narrative has casually accumulated a number of other rural lives, all afflicted by the forces of free trade in one way or another, and as the two men reconverge, each with his different but complementary misery, an unexpectedly gripping story begins to crystallise. Suddenly the book’s seemingly haphazard elements begin working together: the sexual and political impotence, the helpless yearning for the past, the degraded (and downgraded) masculinity, the aggrieved, incel-eye view of things, the foggy coastal landscape with its scavenger humans and seabirds, the sinister new interest in firearms, all coalescing into a vision of life among a portion of humanity who have found themselves – often to their indignant amazement – stuck on the wrong side in the zero sum game of globalised commerce. There is a horribly troubling scene of transactional paedophilia involving a visitor in one of the bungalows. I wish I could dismiss it as just another piece of cheap authorial vice-signalling, but the nastiness feels for once necessary: an integral part of the blighted reality Serotonin seeks to articulate.

Houellebecq has been credited with foreseeing the gilets jaunes movement with this novel, especially in the dramatic scenes of armed confrontation that bring this middle section to its unnerving climax. Deservedly so, I think, if only for his conjuring of the blackly pessimistic psychology that distinguishes these kinds of revolt from other, more high-minded uprisings. Does this redeem the crassness of those earlier scenes? Not really: crass is crass, even if it turns out to be strategic. And instead of sensibly ending on its high note, the book meanders on through a set of ridiculous plot twists in Labrouste’s personal life, petering out on a note of morbid self-pity.

And yet there it is. The agony and rage of the demoted, the discarded, the “deplorable” (a segment of them, if not the whole basket), laid bare. What other novelist would have the willingness to go there, let alone the wherewithal? Out of this feeble excuse for a hat, Houellebecq has once again pulled, if nothing warm and fluffy, something at least dangerously alive.

James Lasdun’s Victory is published by Vintage. Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq is published by Heinemann (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaHJno5q9cH6PaKqeqp%2BpvK%2B1zWaZsmWdnrCpsctmn6itlaG5pq7EnKhmqpWrtqbD