Rumaan Alam on the 1970 novel "worth writing twice."
Max Ginsburg's cover art for the 1982 Bantam Books edition of John Knowles' novel, A Separate Peace.
By Rumaan Alam
Excerpted from the Foreword to A Domestic Animal, by Francis King
I’ll begin with what is either warning or recommendation: A Domestic Animal is a love story. So many turn out to be, because the subject—with its attendants of sex, obsession, and other deep feelings—cannot be exhausted. It’s maybe one of the tasks of art, to make sense of this most illogical and human thing. At any rate, our novelists seem to keep trying.
Our hero is Dick Thompson, a novelist himself, a confirmed bachelor who is tormented by love, for Antonio. Dick is “fortyish” and has the middle-age worries of the middle class: bills and home renovations. Antonio is an academic, visiting England from his native Italy, who rents a room in Dick’s place. A hunky soccer player who’s also a philosophy student? Well, this is a work of fiction.
The novel is not that interested in questions of gay and straight, a book from 1970 that anticipated an understanding of sexuality as spectrum rather than binary. Antonio has a wife and two children back in Italy, and he takes a local girl, the vapid Pam, as a mistress. But there’s something between the two men: “All my life I have been embarrassed at touching or being touched by others . . . and even with Antonio I would shrink away. Frequently he would pat my head or run a hand through my hair.” Francis King plays this for comedy, fussy British queen meets demonstrative Mediterranean, shades of Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison. At any rate, I laughed.
It’s not love at first sight but a gradual awakening to something: “As he shook my hand it was as though some piece of machinery, long left unused and untended, slowly began to grind into movement through hampering encrustations of rust and dust and dirt.” But Dick’s affection is not returned. “A better choice would be someone who was capable of returning that love,” Antonio tells Dick, reasonably enough, when the older man eventually confesses his feeling.
Maybe so. Dick is not apologetic or morose; indeed, he seems to relish his own agony, which he knows is part of the pleasure of being alive. “No, I could not wish not to care for him entirely; I did not wish to step down off that cross. But I wanted to have this intensity of love without this intensity of suffering.” Dick sounds rather as I remember feeling in college, perhaps more in love with the “cross” of my unrequited longing than the young man who preoccupied me the entirety of my twentieth year.
I don’t want to spoil the plot because King has concocted a surprising one, but I will skip ahead to the book’s conclusion:
I see myself now as the sufferer from an illness which all remedies—surgery, drugs, a change of scene, rest—may palliate but can never cure. Of course, like all such sufferers, I hope for the ‘miracle’—the spontaneous regression that, in an infinitesimally small minority of cases, even the scientists agree to be possible. The deeply-rooted may all at once begin to dissolve and be absorbed into a system that asserts its long-withheld authority. But somehow I doubt it.
I expected A Domestic Animal to be a document of gay life in a benighted past. It isn’t, exactly. The American Psychiatric Association notoriously considered homosexuality a pathology until 1973. Dick does them one better; maybe love is a private experience by definition, maybe—gay or straight—it’s a disease without a cure.
Francis King began publishing when he was an undergraduate. He was one of those true literary creatures, working as a translator, publishing collections of poetry and short stories, writing a biography (of E. M. Forster), but the novel was his métier. A Domestic Animal was his twelfth, and he’d go on to publish more than the same number again before his death, at 88.
There’s some natural temptation to understand Dick Thompson, this novel’s novelist protagonist, as a stand-in for King. A Domestic Animal opens with a stern authorial note: “the ‘I’ is not I.” This is impossible to reconcile with the author’s autobiography, Yesterday Came Suddenly.
As I have described in what I consider one of the three best of my novels, A Domestic Animal, I became totally obsessed with someone who, although he clearly liked and admired me and although he was no less clearly flattered by my devotion, was totally incapable of the sort of reciprocation for which I yearned. Although married and the father of two children, he had a girlfriend, with whom he spent most of his evenings. Each evening, after he called out to me, ‘Ciao, Francesco, I go now!’, I used to suffer a terrible desolation. I would try to settle to some writing, a book, television. But I could not stop thinking of him.
The novel became the subject of a libel case (it was not Antonio’s real-life counterpart who objected). “We writers are all too often cannibals,” King writes in his memoir, “in devouring family and friends, and cads, in betraying the secrets entrusted to us.” A Domestic Animal was withdrawn before publication, revised, and published anew. This seems useful context for a reader, and not the uninteresting question of the tension between fact and fiction. King considered this book worth writing twice, and when taking stock of his long career ranked this one of his most significant achievements.
I learned about being gay from books. I was a child in a more innocent era. When the other kids called me a faggot, I believed them even if I didn’t get it, tried to parse the meaning of the word from that one Dire Straits song. The year I was fourteen, I read John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and something fell into place. Phineas tells Gene he’s his “best pal,” and Gene is unable to respond.
I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
Before the internet existed, maybe all fledgling queers were confined to that “level of feeling, deeper than thought.” Or maybe I was an especially naïve teen. The APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders told one story—so potent you didn’t even need to read it—but at least I had novels. I’ve no memory of how I came to know about them, but I furtively bought Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and David Leavitt’s Family Dancing. I could not believe that literature might address the subject of what I was, or that what I was might be worthy of consideration.
It’s fashionable, now, to talk about an imperative to cultivate a literature that depicts the panoply of human existence. It’s a matter of revising the canon, of publishing writers who would have been overlooked in a different time, of believing that books can and should be about all sorts of people. It’s been distilled to the word representation, which often feels wrong to me because that’s not, I don’t think, one of the aims of the novel as a form. Nevertheless, I discovered as a teen that a book has the power to ratify your very existence. It’s not fiction’s principal endeavor, just a kind of added bonus. I don’t know what straight readers make of it, but when I was but a boy, I was determined to catch a glimpse of myself in A Separate Peace, like trying to make out my reflection in a mud puddle. That’s why David Leavitt and Edmund White were so startling, their books revealing me, clearly as a mirror.
Perhaps it follows that I, a gay novelist at middle age, would be moved by A Domestic Animal. If I’ve reached the point of midlife crisis, how lovely to imagine that what lies ahead might not be the embarrassment of a sports car or a leather jacket or a toupee but something quite beautiful. Dick is in crisis, no question, but he’s also in love:
Naturally morose by temperament, I felt an astonishing exhilaration; naturally critical, I noticed how my judgements of others had suddenly grown generous. Friends would say to me ‘How well you are looking!’ Or even ‘How happy you seem!’
King understands love’s power. It alters our perspective. Antonio’s voracity at the table repels one of Dick’s friends. “But this rapacity, so far from disgusting me, struck me as curiously poignant.” Dick can’t see an ill-mannered man but a boy going hungry in postwar Italy. Love asks us to submit, and we do, and find pleasure in that. “Like most Italian men Antonio was used to being spoiled by women.” Dick runs out to buy his lodger new shoelaces, his feeling elevating the errand to something like sacrament.
It used to be either unthinkable or just bad form to get into the erotic. Maybe that explains a contemporary bias, that this fundamental aspect of human life is a recent invention. King allows Dick his lust: “. . . the day when he called me into his room as he was preparing for a football match and there he was, totally unselfconscious, standing at the window in nothing but his Y-fronted pants, one arm under the other to scratch at his naked, freckled back.” (I was struck by the echo of how John Knowles describes Phineas, early in A Separate Peace, stripping off his clothes and clambering up a tree, “his back muscles working like a panther’s.”)
I am, as I write this, about the age Francis King was when he wrote A Domestic Animal. If I’m reading Dick as some proxy for myself, that is presumably how all the other boys in ninth grade read A Separate Peace. How nice that this doesn’t require acrobatics of my imagination; how nice to simply tell it as it is. Of course, identity—gay, Black, trans, what have you—cannot supplant the demands of a novel: plot, character, ideas. And that this is a gay novel does not mean it will not yield to a straight reader.
But that this is a gay novel is worth saying, worth celebrating. I can’t be the only gay reader who thrilled at the scene of Dick stealing into Antonio’s bedroom, “excited, as I was always to be, by the smell rising up from the garments that littered the floor and from the bedclothes that were so much twisted and rumpled that they suggested hours of frantic lovemaking.” I read this and thought, yes, that’s right. It’s sexy and naughty and funny. It’s not pitiable but powerful. That Dick’s love goes unrequited is neither here nor there. He is at midlife, but he is more than not dead yet. He is alive.
Rumaan Alam
New York, 2026