Britons judge my sex scenes too harshly, says Franzen

JONATHAN FRANZEN has been shortlisted for almost every literary award going, including the Pulitzer Prize.

But one nomination preoccupies him: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Franzen said he could not understand why his writing had made it on to the list, and concluded that English readers were harsh critics of sex scenes.

The novelist is promoting his sixth novel, Crossroads but when asked at a British literary festival if the book featured sex, Franzen revealed his anxiety.

“It’s always weird talking about sex in my books in England because I feel like there’s a [harsh] measure of what’s OK to write about and what’s not,” he said.

His bestseller, Freedom, was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2010, a decision that still rankles.

“The Bad Sex Award is an English award, right?” he asked. What was wrong with what I wrote? I don’t get it.”

At the time, the Literary Review noted Franzen’s “propensity for innuendo which comes over a bit Benny Hill”. The passage which caught their attention included Franzen referring to “a protruding pencil of tenderness”.

His interviewer at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the writer Clare Clark, did not provide much consolation when she told him that being nominated for the Bad Sex Award was “a twisted English compliment … they only award it to people who are good enough writers to know better”.

Franzen said Clark had not offered him “a pathway to feeling OK about it”.

Defending his sex scenes, he said: “Sex is a big part of people’s lives, particularly young people. I can’t [draw] a curtain over it because how a particular moment of sex plays out is important.

“I know, for myself, that I have memories of those moments and they’ve stayed with me because they were sometimes great, sometimes terrible, sometimes super-awkward, sometimes remarkably not awkward.

“In every case, I remember it vividly and I wouldn’t [close] off that part of what a person experiences or remembers because it might make someone uncomfortable to read about it.”

Also at the festival, Sebastian Faulks discussed the awkwardness of writing sex scenes, which he said was “traditionally thought to be impossible because our vocabulary is so impoverished, and you either end up being pornographic or sugary sweet.

“The fact it’s so difficult doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try although, of course, in the back of your mind there’s always the

Literary Review’s Bad Sex prize.”