The Catholic

by David Plante

Set in Boston in the sixties, Daniel Francoeur is featured in this exploration of Catholicism and sexual obsession and of the conflicting demands and constraints they impose

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Gay, Gay Fiction

151 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

The son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante, he is of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent.He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his honours are: Henfield Fellow, University of East Anglia, 1975; British Arts Council Grant, 1977; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1983. He is an Ambassador for the LGBT Committee of the New York Public Library. His voluminous diary is kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. His papers are kept in the library of The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a retired professor of creative writing at Columbia University. His novels examine the spiritual in a variety of contexts, but notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background. His male characters range from openly gay to sexually ambiguous and questioning.
He has been a writer-in-residence at Gorki Institute of Literature (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King's College, the University of Cambridge, Tulsa University, and the University of East Anglia. Plante’s work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and the widely-praised Francoeur Trilogy--The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982). His most recent book is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years, The Pure Lover (2009). The papers of his former partner, Nikos Stangos (1936-2004), are in The Princeton University Library, the Program in Hellenic Studies. Plante lives in London, Lucca Italy, and Athens Greece. He has dual citizenship, American and British.
Considered to be a writer's writer and having lived for so many years among the artistic elite, David's personal memories are seen by many as high cultural history.

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, odd tale that blends classic gay fiction with poetry and philosophy, David Plante's "The Catholic" hasn't aged well and just simply does not make sense.

Ostensibly a tale of a renegade former Catholic French man exploring his gay sexuality in Boston, Plante uses first-person narration to dive into the psyche of a confused young man. Dan meets a boy at a bar and falls in love with the idea of him he has in his head, an idea formed after just on meeting. Following this meeting, Dan destroys all of his pride - and his friendships - trying to dissect this ideal he's constructed in his head. Only after seeing his ideal in the flesh at a time when he is sick is Dan finally able to get over his "love."

A combination of far-too-overwritten and lacking a proper story, "The Catholic" is a disappointment of classic gay fiction.

[nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unhinged. Chaotic. Brilliant writing. The plot sometimes got lost in the philosophical tangents, but it was always reeled back in. Plus, I enjoyed some of them. A lot of them called me out, as philosophy intends. However, don’t think I’m mature enough to read about k*nky sex from a pretentious, literary fiction stand point yet. (Hopefully soon). Anyways, 4/5 stars, good read!

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief but interesting existential examination of his life, his faith, his sexuality, and his relationships. It is very nicely written and although he spins out a bit too much, it is certainly a great representation of many gay men's lives.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in 1987 when American companies were just beginning to publish gay men’s fiction in what seemed like large numbers. I now believe I read it rather hurriedly, paying close attention to the sex scenes often written in great detail. I did this novel a great disservice. I now view it as a wonderful portrayal of a young man in the 1960s struggling not so much with being with men sexually but being with them in the world, his Catholic world in particular.

Dan, a young man teaching public school in Boston, narrates his short past: his father, his mother, his sister, their upbringing. With regard to his high school education, he tells of what seems like raping his good friend Charlie—an event they never mention again, even though they do remain friends into their twenties. Dan frequents the Boston bars where men meet men to have sex, and he goes home with a similarly aged man named Henry. In what may be one of the longest sex scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel, Dan and Henry hungrily and repeatedly devour one another until early in the morning there is little left of either of them. At the same time, the chapter, as is the book, is full of Dan’s intellectualization or rationalization of the experience that he is tempted to think of as love:

I wondered how many people he had made love with on this sheet. It was penetrated with the presences of how many lovers, their sweat and saliva and whatever sperm hadn’t been wiped away by the towel? I smoothed out the wrinkles between our bodies and was reminded of the sheets I used to see in the college dormitory pulled from the beds by women every Monday morning and thrown into piles in the corridors. As I passed them I used to imagine they retained the impressions of all the bodies that slept in them, had jerked off and maybe made love with others in them, and I wanted to fall into one of the piles” (31).

Dan thinks this deeply and philosophically about everything including the religion he claims to have abandoned. Near the end of the novel, the following idea occurs to him:

If what I was struggling for was faith, I had not even reconciled in myself how that faith was to be achieved, through my own will or a vast will-lessness. I would never reconcile these. I was struggling both to overcome and to be overcome, and in doing this I was struggling for the realization of my greatest desire, for belief” (146).

Up until the end, Dan’s beliefs subliminally lace his thoughts:

I wished I had drawn blood from Henry, just a little, then drawn blood from the same part of my body, from our arms or chests, and pressed his blood into mine” (150).

The phrases that ring of Genesis—"bone of my bone” and “flesh of my flesh”—seem to imbue Dan’s desire to make Henry’s blood his as well. It seems that once a Catholic always a Catholic, but that aphorism may be too simple. Perhaps, once human, always human is more like it, and that concept seems to be what Dan cannot learn or accept.

[Douglas Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard David Plante on Michael Silverblatt's show, and that made me seek this out. The interview was probably better than the book. I'd hate to be stuck next to this narrator at a dinner party.