Opening up and novelty have been the themes of an autumn awards season rich in firsts: first US author (Paul Beatty) winning the Man Booker prize; first title about a non-mainstream sport (surfing in William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days) chosen as William Hill sports book of the year; and, this week, the first time a translated novel – The Day Before Happiness by Italy’s Erri De Luca, translated by Jill Foulston – has provided the risible romp selected for the annual Bad Sex award.
Like the Booker, the Literary Review’s prize for “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description” has steadily widened its international scope. Launched by the monthly’s then editor Auberon Waugh in 1993, it too began with British novelists, mock-honouring the erotic swagger of the likes of Melvyn Bragg, Philip Kerr, Sebastian Faulks and AA Gill in the decade of resurgent laddism.
But it subsequently introduced Americans earlier and Commonwealth authors later, alternating ageing but still rampant transatlantic grandees (Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, John Updike) with some more cocksure Brits in the noughties, before picking recent winners from India, Canada and Nigeria as well as the US – Morrissey, crowned last year, is the UK’s only Bad Sex laureate in a poor run of form since 2008. Now it has gone beyond the Booker (which bars translated fiction, leaving it to its sister award, the Man Booker international prize) by welcoming in continental Europe and potentially non-Anglophone countries further afield.
At the ceremony beneath the chandeliers of the (“In and Out”) Naval and Military club in St James’s, the two very English shortlisted home entries, by Tom Connolly (“he watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans as she sucked him”) and Janet Ellis, right, (“I am pinned like wet washing with his peg”), won ironic cheers when read out. De Luca’s effort (“My body was her gearstick”), also well received but less warmly, nevertheless triumphed.
Drawing, like Elena Ferrante, on a 50s childhood in Naples, De Luca, 66, has already been unfairly slated here as a Ferrante copycat (“jumping on the Neapolitan bandwagon” thundered the Spectator) although The Day Before Happiness appeared in Italy in 2009, two years before her quartet began with My Brilliant Friend. And picking his passage (“una scena molto hard” – very graphic or porny – as La Repubblica put it, reporting the Italian victory) also seems harsh, since, like other Bad Sex winners, it could be defended as first-person, not authorial, narration: the images and ideas are comically crude and exaggerated because they reflect the orphaned urchin hero’s first wide-eyed experience of sex.
This was a non-vintage year for Bad Sex, in which the shortlist tellingly consisted of only six passages (rather than the usual eight or more), and Auberon Waugh’s son Alexander didn’t perform his customary continuity-preserving role as compere. De Luca was the sixth consecutive winner not to receive the prize in person, but in his case there was no witty message in place of attendance and no one from his UK publisher Allen Lane – perhaps they were stunned, as the cerebral Penguin imprint is not known for fiction, let alone erotic fiction – appeared on the podium to collect the trophy from Lucius Malfoy, aka Jason Isaacs.
As with the Booker, becoming more international could either be seen as a positive initiative or as a tacit admission of dissatisfaction with what’s available without it. On Wednesday evening, the Bad Sex prize had the disoriented air of a project whose original purpose – ridiculing high-profile literary novelists for their filthy bits, and so deterring others – was achieved long ago, leaving it lacking a raison d’etre. For better or worse, its work is done: classy potential contenders now either cut out sex scenes entirely, or – as with Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, which apparently was deemed to be good, or at least non-objectionable, sex – carefully avoid the kind of details and metaphors that sound ludicrous when removed from context and drily read out by actors to a champagne-swilling crowd in a gentlemen’s club.
