Domesticity

Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author's own favorite novels of his career

Joris-Karl Huysmans' semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Emile Zola and his turn toward a "new naturalism" that laid out the negative consequences of determinism. Domesticity tells the tale of the novelist Andre Jayant and the artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of the body and the urges of the soul, and with the failure of matrimony or artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late 19th-century Paris and its sad, futile affairs of the heart. Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the grimy naturalism of Marthe to the cornerstone of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite Becalmed.