Domesticity

Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan and a foreword by Brian R. Banks / May 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 320 pp. / 978-1-962728-03-4

Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.

Domesticity tells the tale of the novelist André Jayant and the artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the 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-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.

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

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 gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.