Michel Houellebecq's 2019 novel is narrated by Florent-Claude Labrouste, a forty-six-year-old agronomist who has worked for the French Ministry of Agriculture and now finds himself so depressed that, in his own words, he is dying of sadness. He takes a new antidepressant, Captorix, which raises his serotonin levels enough to keep him functioning but extinguishes his libido. Abruptly walking out on his life in Paris and his young Japanese girlfriend, Florent-Claude disappears into anonymity and travels back through the places of his past, reckoning with the women he loved and lost, above all Camille, whose loss he now sees as the central failure of his life. In Normandy he reconnects with Aymeric, an old friend from agricultural school and the heir to an aristocratic family, who is trying to keep a dairy farm afloat against European Union quotas, free trade and global competition. Aymeric's desperation, and the armed blockade he joins with other farmers, gives the novel its political charge; the book was published in France just as the Yellow Vest protests spread across the country, and many readers saw it as a portrait of rural France abandoned by globalization. As always with Houellebecq, the voice is caustic, sexually explicit and frequently offensive, mixing bleak comedy with despair about the decline of the West, the market logic invading intimate life, and the impossibility of love. Yet beneath the provocation lies an unusually raw sense of regret, making it one of his most emotionally direct and melancholy books.