Douglas Stuart on Great Novels of Gay Life
When the Booker Prize-winning novelist Douglas Stuart started out as a writer, he said recently, “anything that had gay content in it was on a certain shelf in the store—usually at the back.” Not long ago, Stuart—whose new book, “John of John,” is out now—joined us to recommend a few of the profusion of great gay novels that have been published since then. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
As Meat Loves Salt
by Maria McCann
I’ve read this novel maybe six or seven times. It deals with so many things—war, class, a country in flux—and every time I read it, I find something very different in it, because it is so richly and intricately drawn. It’s one of those books which have a real panorama of human emotion in it. I would say it’s for fans of Hilary Mantel or “Wuthering Heights.”
The book takes place in the seventeenth century, at the time of the English Civil War. The protagonist is a darkly violent, possessive young man named Jacob Cullen, who works in a manor house. At the outset, he does something so unforgivable that he sets out to join Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, as though to cleanse himself by losing himself in war.
Then he falls in love with a fellow-soldier. After the war, the two of them set about establishing a utopian farming colony, based on equality and reclaiming the land for common use. Although their relationship begins as a love story, the book brings home the profits of Jacob’s earlier brutality—fate catches up to him, and everything that is love and passion sort of spoils into wrath and obsession.
Clear
by Carys Davies
This novel is set in Scotland during the Highland Clearances, a period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Scottish landlords drove the rural poor off their land because the landlords realized that they could make more profit if they put sheep on it. It’s a very important, very cruel period of Scottish history that we don’t talk about enough.
The events of the Clearances catalyze the action in this novel, which begins with John, a Presbyterian minister, having accepted a commission to sail to a remote island and evict its last tenant. The tenant, Ivar, has been living alone on the island for decades, with only the elements and the animals and the sea for company. Shortly after John gets to the island, he has a terrible accident. He’s found unconscious and badly injured, and Ivar takes him home and tends to him.
The two men develop a closeness. For John, who is not only a minister but also married, this is obviously very taboo—but it’s also rendered as natural. Outside the gaze of the broader world, he can just be who he is. It’s a deeply romantic setup. And I think that’s what I love about this book—you can look at the characters and their sexuality in isolation from the morals and the judgments of society. Complications arise only when the world arrives on their doorstep.
The Story of the Night
by Colm Tóibín
This is one of Tóibín’s most beautiful books, I think. It’s a novel about loss and change, loving and losing, set in Argentina in the nineteen-eighties. The main character is an introverted English teacher named Richard Garay, who lives a very quiet and small life, in the shadow of his widowed mother.
One day, Richard’s mother dies. She’s been such a pivotal influence in his life that her death is, for him, a kind of reluctant liberation. And then, one day, he meets a handsome stranger, and they fall in love. After that, we watch as he is sent into a period of change and enlightenment against the backdrop of a country that is also rapidly changing.
One of the things I love about this book is its depiction of a gay son and his mother, the way it shows the devotion that they have for each other, how they are a balm for one another’s loneliness—but also how they are, in some ways, each in the other’s way, each part of the reason why the other is stuck in life and can’t move forward. Once the mother goes, you see this wonderful transformation in Richard, who finds himself and has this great love. It’s a love story that broke my heart, by the end.