Serotonin - six years later

Is Houellebecq the new Camus?

Six years ago I first read Serotonin, and wrote my thoughts here. Now I've read it again. The thing with Houellebecq is that a single reading is never enough. His work constitutes a peculiarly male interiority, written without shame or inhibition; I can't imagine women readers enjoying it - they have perennial illusions - flattering ones - about the male psyche. Houellebecq is not the new Camus as I proposed before, however, though both are beholden to the same malaise.

Camus’s absurdism sought dignity in revolt - lucid endurance against a silent and pointless cosmos. His stance was tragic but moral: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Houellebecq’s world has no such rebellion. His protagonists surrender rather than resist. Their alienation is social, not really metaphysical: hopelessness born from late-capitalist atomisation, sexual failure, and bureaucratic sterility. Where Camus’s Meursault faced the sun and pondered, Houellebecq’s narrators close the curtains and despair.

Camus’s nihilism was stoic; Houellebecq’s is depressive. Yet both grasp the same intuition: meaning is no more than a human construct. The difference is that Camus urges the effort to keep producing it, while Houellebecq documents the fatigue and futility of trying.

In that sense, Houellebecq is not the prophet of nihilism but its deathbed attendant. He performs the autopsy, not the sermon. He doesn’t argue for nihilism; he records its arrival - the modern Western human-subject drained of transcendence, family, solidarity, or erotic mystery. His novels are clinical reports on what remains when consumer freedom has replaced every other value.

Commodification in action.

His tone is pathologist, not prophet. The souls he dissects are already dead to belief, desire, and purpose. He preserves them in irony, pornography, statistics and quiet despair. Camus still sought a cure: defiance, honour, the beauty of light. Houellebecq accepts there will be no recovery. His literature tidies the remains, labels the jars, and closes the morgue door.

He is popular among the French elite because he tells them the truth about their luxury-modernity in a form they can aestheticise. He articulates their own disillusion: secular, individualist, materially sated yet spiritually void. His novels turn their quiet despair into literature - making alienation itself an object of cultivated pleasure. He flatters the class he dissects by giving their emptiness philosophical depth.

He is both French and Western. His sensibility - rational, ironic, Cartesian in structure - is rooted in French literary tradition but his themes are entirely global: commodified sex, bureaucratic capitalism, digital loneliness, cultural and demographic collapse.

In France he writes as the national conscience; abroad he is read as the Western Everyman: exhausted, lucid, complicit. His readers are not surprised by the view, only curious as to the sordid trajectories of despair his heroes will inhabit as they fade to nothing at all.