“The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.”
Florent-Claude Labrouste is a forty-six-year-old civil servant for the French Ministry of Agriculture who believes “the whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.”
Florent-Claude hates the name he was born with: “Florent is too gentle, too close to the feminine Florence—in a sense, almost androgynous”; “As to Claude, let’s not even mention it; it instantly makes me think of the Claudettes, and the terrifying image of a vintage video of Claude François shown on a loop at a party full of old queens comes to mind as soon as I hear [it].”
Florent-Claude recognizes “it isn’t hard to change your first name, although [not] from a bureaucratic point of view—hardly anything is possible from a bureaucratic point of view”—but “more simply from the point of view of usage: one need only to present oneself under a new name, and after several months or even just several weeks, everyone gets used to it.” And yet, Florent-Claude admits, “I have done nothing, I have gone on being called by that disgusting first name”; “I have allowed myself to be buffeted by circumstances on this point as on almost everything else.”
Florent-Claude is depressed; indeed, he is “very simply, dying of sorrow,” as his Camel-smoking doctor puts it (he smokes a cigarette as he delivers this diagnosis, and proffers one to Florent-Claude, for good measure), in an absurd scene that would not feel out of place in the work of that other writer whose name is sometimes used to signal a sometimes self-pitying contempt for bureaucracy.
Florent-Claude is prescribed Captorix, an antidepressant whose “most undesirable side effects” include “nausea, loss of libido and impotence.”
Florent-Claude falls flat in his flaccid attempt at a joke: “I have never suffered from nausea.”
Florent-Claude Labrouste is one of Michel Houellebecq’s creations: deeply misanthropic, misogynistic, unable to satisfy his Asian girlfriend.
Houellebecq has written about Florent-Claude before.
Serotonin (FSG, 2019), the aging bad boy of French letters’ latest outing, exhausts nearly half its word count rehashing this tired material. Then, when Captorix finally renders Florent-Claude impotent, it picks up.
***
One morning, after he goes through his “live-in” Japanese girlfriend, Yuzu’s, computer, and discovers numerous videos of her in the center of numerous gangbangs—one involving a Doberman Pinscher, a boxer, and a bull terrier—Florent-Claude leaves without notice, and abandons Paris for the countryside.
He goes to stay with Aymeric, his “only true friend” and former roommate at the Institut National Agronomique, where Houellebecq himself studied.
Aymeric is even more hard up than Florent-Claude: the only student from their graduating class to take over a farming business (“agronomic engineers were present in almost every area of agribusiness, sometimes in technical posts and most often directorial, but hardly ever became farmers themselves”), Aymeric is struggling to make a living.
It’s not clear exactly why Aymeric’s farm is failing. There are vague references to globalization, “Brussels bureaucracy”; Florent-Claude can’t bring himself to admit that while working for the Ministry of Agriculture he was “directly implicated in [a] project promoting the export of Normandy cheeses” (“I stressed the more administrative tasks […] those questions of exasperating legal formalism”); Aymeric tries to follow regulations and meet quotas—produce only unpasteurized milk from only Normande cows, feed them only non-GMO maize—but confesses: “The more I try to do things correctly, the harder it gets to make ends meet.”
To add insult to injury, Aymeric—once Florent-Claude’s “absolute masculine ideal”—is being cuckolded by his wife, with a Parisian pianist, no less. Eventually, she leaves Aymeric for the city, and leaves him with the impossible task of salvaging the farm on his own.
When Aymeric confesses as much to Florent-Claude, Florent-Claude—flushed from a bottle of Chablis (Aymeric is “busy necking down a bottle of Zubrowka,” has taken to drinking at all hours of the day)—tries to persuade Aymeric that there are “hundreds, thousands, millions,” of other fish in the sea, proper “farmers’ wives”—“a Moldovan girl, or a Cameroonian or a Malagasy girl, a Laotian even”—who will “be up and about at five in the morning to do the milking” and will then “wake you up with a blow-job, and breakfast will be ready as well…”
But when Florent-Claude looks up, convinced that Aymeric has been drinking in every word of his fantasy, he sees that his old friend has nodded off; that he too has lost the capacity for sex; that drugs and despair have rendered him impotent: “We had both reached more or less the same point; our fates were different, but the ending wasn’t dissimilar”; “What was the point of saving a defeated old male?”
It’s the rhetorical question Houellebecq’s entire oeuvre has been trying in vain to answer.
Serotonin offers no salvation—not even ironically: Florent-Claude will return with his tail between his legs to the city; Aymeric will abandon any attempt to save the farm, and go through instead with a course of decidedly un-divine violence, misdirected at the agents of bureaucracy and ultimately self-destructive.
If this is Houellebecq’s “yellow vests” novel, as many commentators have christened it for its eleventh hour depiction of Euroskeptic farmers in revolt—and if Houellebecq really does have the prophetic powers the same chorus endows him with (the Sérotonine manuscript was delivered to his French publisher Flammarion before the gilets jaunes protests officially began)—then it spells disaster for the populist grassroots movement celebrating its first birthday in the streets.
Houellebecq—Euroskeptic, parliamentary democracy-skeptic, skeptic—has, despite his professed “sympathy” for the yellow vests, perhaps (or perhaps not, let’s apply some skepticism where skepticism is due) inadvertently diagnosed the movement with the same symptom or side effect his narrator suffers from: impotence.
- Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq (translated by Shaun Whiteside) is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.