Novel ways to mate

There is a theory, and it sounds plausible. Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike and Paul Theroux — those writers in permanent residency on the longlists of literature’s grandest honours — are actually in the game for just one prize: the Bad Sex Award. Announced annually by Britain’s Literary Review since 1993, it last week eluded this formidable quartet — as well as India’s latest entrant in the race, Tarun Tejpal. It was clasped instead by a food critic, Giles Coren, for his meditations on alienation and kinkiness in Winkler. And so it will go on. English writing’s worthiest minds will return once again next year to that most challenging —and selfless — of tasks: to insinuate such a gross and revolting sexual description into a well-written piece of fiction that the reader inspired to refer the passage to the jury can walk off with the award’s cash component.

There is, in addition, another group of persons who must be thrilling in this scouring of quality novels for tasteless depictions of sex. Evolutionary science has found its way to the last frontier, the literature sections of academia, and a new discipline has been born: Literary Darwinism. Its adherents pare down texts for what they say are universal human behavioural patterns, patterns that give proof of evolutionary ideals like natural selection and survival of the fittest. Predictably they take remarkable interest in the mating game, and in its dynamics discern forecasts for the longevity of our species. They would be bound to find common cause with Auberon Waugh’s original charter for the Bad Sex Award: “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel”.

They, all of them, of course forget that other universal pursuit, fun. Maybe they had better hear out Coren. Upon winning, he said he wished he’d written all the passages in the reckoning this year. Meanwhile, may we be allowed to hope that this will inspire Arundhati Roy to return to fiction for a second shot at the award?