Joshua Ferris: We Don’t Really Have Anybody Writing Boldly About Sex

Vanity Fair‘s Claire Howorth talks with Joshua Ferris, lit darling and author of the acclaimed Then We Came to the End and the new The Unnamed.

VF: Do you think your generation of writers is conflicted about sex? Or feels awkward writing about it? The Unnamed contains two pretty notable sex scenes and they’re… relatively tame… I mean, they’re not Roth-ian…

JF: But they’re also not deciding to masturbate in two corners [laughs]. If I had gone on, it would’ve taken the wrong tone. I think if a book is going to take on sex, it should take on sex, and do so boldly.

I’m not sure that there’s a categorical mistake that’s being made somewhere by saying that this generation of writers is too tame compared to the earlier generation, or that somehow this generation doesn’t take it as seriously, or is even less preoccupied by it. A lot of those Roth and Updike books almost have sex as the only object.

I don’t know where a writer can be faulted… Michael Chabon, let’s say. Michael Chabon can’t be faulted for having a far more ambiguous ending spot or approach towards sex simply because he might be the heir to Bellow or Roth.

I think you could talk similarly about a departure of prose style, and wonder, well, why isn’t Jonathan Safran Foer writing as effervescently as Bellow? It seems slightly misguided.

At the same time, we don’t really have anybody writing boldly about sex. So maybe there is something in the water, I’m not sure. But I suspect that it’s not over. I don’t think the sex game is over.

Information from Vanity Fair.