Macron’s prophet

France’s literary event of the year took place this week with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Serotonin. Named after the brain chemical that regulates mood, his seventh novel has been described by one French newspaper as ‘prophesying the yellow vest movement’.

The critics have lavished praise and the public are plucking it from the shelves. The initial print run was 320,000, which is quite something given that the average run for a novel in France is 5,000 copies. And it’s selling so fast that I haven’t been able to obtain a copy from the booksellers close to where I live in Paris. It’s a similar story in Germany, where the print run of 80,000 is virtually unheard of for a foreign author, and Spain. British fans of Houellebecq will have to wait until September for the English edition.

Why is this 62-year-old Frenchman so popular across Europe? It’s easy to explain, when you take into consideration the prescience of his prose but more specifically his courage in tackling subjects that most of his contemporaries shy away from. His 2001 novel Platform, about an Islamist attack on a resort in Thailand, was published eight days before 9/11. Submission, the dystopian novel that depicted an Islamist party winning the 2022 presidential election, was released on 7 January 2015. Hours later, two Islamist gunmen shot dead some of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Like Submission, Serotonin is narrated by a morose middle-aged white man who is worn down by sexual anxiety and spiritual torpor. His penis, like his country, doesn’t possess the grandeur that it once did. Quitting the city and returning to his native Normandy, the protagonist, Florent-Claude Labrouste, discovers a countryside and a people ruined by EU policies.