Bad Sex/Good Sex: Nancy Huston and the Boundaries of Erotic Writing

In 2012 Nancy Huston’s novel Infrared, the self-translated English-language version of her 2010 novel Infrarouge, won the annual Bad Sex Award, established in 1993 by the UK-based Literary Review to “reward” the author of “an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” Yet both critical and popular acclaim for Huston’s work includes acknowledgment of its compelling representation of relations between the sexes, and indeed of sex tout court. This article asks what kind of boundaries Huston overstepped to so displease the judges of the Literary Review. It explores what constitutes ‘bad’ and ‘good’ sex in twenty-first-century women’s writing, through the prism of Huston’s bilingual fiction and particularly Infrarouge.