Serotonin, by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this novel of midlife collapse, Houellebecq reprises his attack on the ideological pretensions of contemporary Western society. A misanthropic agronomist, after discovering the infidelity of his girlfriend (whom he already despised), abandons Paris—“infested with eco-friendly bourgeois”—for Normandy, where he once lived and loved happily. But the countryside proves just as bleak: free trade has devastated agriculture, farmers are resorting to violence, and insipid liberal notions of progress have stripped the world of eros and beauty. Houellebecq indulges in his trademark offensiveness, but the misogynist jabs feel pro forma. More notable is the specificity of his satire—he has a degree in agronomy—and the seriousness of his engagement with the economic asperities of provincial France in the era of the gilets jaunes.
Salt Slow, by Julia Armfield (Flatiron). The girls and women in this début collection of stories are monstrous: they molt, peel, fracture, decompose, murder, consume, engulf. Pubescent girls shed skin and teeth as new appetites awaken; mysterious music arouses violence and obsession in the girls who hear it. When the inhabitants of a city lose their ability to sleep, one woman’s sleep steps out of her and begins to move around on its own. Such metamorphoses—regarded with horror by male characters but with equanimity by the women—are both delightful and discomfiting, like the dead bats one woman receives from her sister: “gory little offerings, dank-furred and often still twitching.”
Home Now, by Cynthia Anderson (PublicAffairs). In 2006, a man rolled a pig’s head through the doorway of a mosque in Lewiston, Maine. Anderson, a journalist who grew up nearby, chronicles the transformation of a formerly white town by an influx of Somali refugees, drawing on the perspectives of old and new residents. The result is a varied political picture: immigration to Lewiston has revitalized the town, after decades of decline, but, in 2016, Maine gave Trump his only electoral-college vote in New England. Anderson is critical of the systems that vet and support refugees, and deplores the attitude of liberals who, fearful of seeming “insensitive” or of providing “ammunition to haters,” avoid discussion of any problems.
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, by Meryle Secrest (Knopf). In 1960, Adriano Olivetti, the second-generation head of Olivetti, the Italian company famous for its typewriters, died on a train, apparently of a heart attack. This tantalizing history, however, argues that he was murdered—collateral damage in a Cold War struggle over technology. Secrest marshals an impressive array of circumstantial evidence encompassing the shadowy web of business, politics, and espionage that ensnared postwar Italy. Her account is rooted in a colorful portrait of Adriano himself, a Socialist who dreamed of “enlightened capitalism,” had just launched a personal-computer division, and planned to sell his computers in Russia and China.
