Serotonin (2019)

by Michel Houellebecq

Standard Houellebecqian lamentations delivered by a hilarious, pathetic, unreliable narrator.

At the Altar of Progress the West has sacrificed community interaction for commercial transaction; romance for casual carnal entertainment; the will to produce for the reflex to consume; national autonomy for Brussels autocracy; Christian morality for ego-driven hedonism. The end result is a society with adults as poorly adjusted as Serotonin’s narrator where radical brain chemistry alteration is a routine and largely unacknowledged mass coping mechanism.

Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn’t formalize them, we didn’t have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then, for a very long time, to suffer as a result. (pg. 309)

Of course the preeminent critic of modern society is a Frenchman. Who else?