PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksFlorent-Claude knows he is damned. He also knows that his damnation, that of a materially well-to-do but diminutive, sexually frustrated white male, will evoke the pity of precisely no one. His case is deplorable, and much of Serotonin feels like an exercise in compassion for a man whose abjection wobbles between sincerity and self-indulgence ... the novel manages to be prescient vis-à-vis France’s current political controversies, and it is in this respect that Houellebecq once again puts on the mantle of a literary prophet ... Houellebecq...is too subtle a writer to produce a novel of mere political observation, and Serotonin, whatever its populist flair, is, more significantly, a novel about loss, damnation, and the pitiless indifference of both political and natural processes. It is also a novel about compassion ... Perhaps most provocatively...Serotonin challenges its readers to soften their hearts toward those among us who are refused official pity ... Like all of Houellebecq’s work, Serotonin is, at times, hilarious, sexually graphic, and shockingly irreverent. But it is also a novel of moral seriousness, daring us to increase our compassion in proportion to the seeming loathsomeness of those to whom it is owed.
