[2] Sympathetic to the plight of local farmers, he is powerless to help them retain their traditional methods:[3][4] In short, what is taking place with French agriculture is a vast redundancy plan, but one that is secret and invisible, where people disappear one by one, on their plots of land, without ever being noticed.After watching a television documentary about people who choose to disappear from their life without telling anyone, Labrouste abruptly leaves his girlfriend, a young Japanese woman who is highly sexual but devoid of affection, quits his job under a false pretense and flees to a smoker's room in a chain hotel in another part of Paris.

Shortly after, Aymeric and other struggling farmers fulfill their plan to stop the importation of cheap foreign milk by establishing an armed blockade.

Establishing a sniper's nest in an empty hotel overlooking her isolated house, he comes close to killing her son in order to eventually return to being "the man" in her life.

[3] Written before protesters began blockading roads in real life, Serotonin soon joined previous Houellebecq novels Platform and Submission in being termed eerily prophetic by critics.

[3] Serotonin features its author's trademark black humour and depictions of loveless sex, and also touches on paedophilia (when the narrator spies on a suspicious German tourist) and bestiality (when he finds pornographic videos of his girlfriend on her computer).

[11] Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing for The Observer, labeled it "predictable" and particularly criticized its sexually explicit content, while Dwight Garner, in a review for The New York Times, called it "slack" compared with Houellebecq's earlier work.