Serotonin
By Michel Houellebecq,
William Heinemann, 309pp, £20/$27
Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and professional contrarian, delights in puncturing metro-liberal orthodoxies and shocking the reader with descriptions of internet pornography, pill-popping, sex tourism, the plight of the modern male and other aspects of urban anomie.
Though not for the faint-hearted, Houellebecq is admired in France for his gift of foresight. Submission, his dystopian fantasy of a Saudi-funded Islamic France of the near future, was praised for anticipating the events at the Parisian office of Charlie Hebdo, while his latest novel, Serotonin, coincided with the emergence of the anti-metropolitan French agitators known as the gilets jaunes (yellow vests).
