Literary sex seems to invite bad writing
Bad writing about sex is worse than bad sex. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But don’t we all groan when, in the midst of an otherwise perfectly decent novel, we come across a passage with heaving breasts and fiery loins?
There’s so much bad writing about sex that, since 1993, Britain’s Literary Review has published an annual Bad Sex in Fiction award to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
As this is a family newspaper, I can’t offer an excerpt from James Frey’s “Katerina,” winner of the 2018 Bad Sex in Fiction first prize. Here’s a snippet from 2017 runnerup Venetia Welby’s novel, “Mother of Darkness”: “The green grass curls around Tera’s left breast as she curves her sleek physique around Matty’s diabolical torso like a vine. Paralysed, complete, the marble statue of the lovers allows itself to be painted by the dawn’s lurid orange spillage.” I’m speechless. Longtime Bay Area novelist and writing teacher Ellen Sussman, author of “Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex,” says, “I think that in writing about sex, writers get a chance to tap into unexplored territory. They push below the surface of relationships, of passion, of our urges and need and dreams.”
Sussman doesn’t shy away from writing about sex in her own novels (“On a Night Like This,” “A Wedding in Provence,” “French Lessons,” “The Paradise Guest House”), and explains she tries to look at the topic from a slant rather than straight on. “I try to focus on something other than the genitals ... otherwise we get into the whole throbbing member thing.”
Sussman makes a good point. Elizabeth Benedict, in the opening of her book “The Joy of Writing Sex,” quotes from a letter Anais Nin wrote to a man paying her $1 a page to write erotic stories: “Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”
So it seems the best writing comes with a lessismore approach visavis the actual physical act, and moreismore regarding the context. In Kent Haruf ’s quiet, lovely “Our Souls at Night,” the two main characters, who are 80somethings, experience intimacy long before they get to sex. And when they finally do, it’s described with great restraint — and all the more impactful for that.
Clearly any opinion on the quality of writing about sex depends on the orientation of the reader. A straight man reads a sex scene differently than a bi woman or a trans person. The same probably goes for the cultural orientation of the reader, although it is arguable that great sex writing, like great sex, transcends many boundaries.
Some of the best, more explicit literary sex I’ve read is written by gay women. Jeanette Winterson’s “Written on the Body” is one such example. Also Dorothy Allison’s “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” and Sarah Waters’ “Tipping the Velvet.”
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s effervescent new novel “City of Girls,” the heroine enjoys a full, varied and joyfully depicted sex life without coming to ruin a la Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Novelist Lauren Groff (“Arcadia,” “Fates and Furies”), who writes artfully about sex between married people, says, “Literary sex is almost always between adulterers, single people or teenagers; it’s almost as though there’s a squeamishness about imposing on married characters’ intimacy. I find that stupid in the extreme.”
When it comes to men writing about sex, Jonathan Franzen’s sex scene from hell between Alfred and Enid in “The Corrections” is right up there with the best of them, serving as a painful metaphor for the lack of communication in their relationship. Haruki Murakami, generally a favorite of the literati, has been both pilloried for his malecentric writing about sex and touted for his titillating prose. You decide.
And then there’s the “50 Shades” phenomenon. Ugh, please. Just plain bad writing that piles on cliche after breathless cliche. But then, what do I know? Could a zillion readers be wrong?
I have fond memories of the days when I hid “Candy” and “The Story of O” under my bed, scared to death my mother would find them. There was something delicious about having to be surreptitious. Now that everything is out in the open (sometimes ad nauseam), is it too much to ask for the erotica we read to be well written? I think not.
Since 1993, Britain’s Literary Review has published an annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.