Diana: A Diary in the Second Person (Biblioasis, 127 pp.) is an erotica novel written by Russell Smith, the Globe and Mail’s favourite sartorial son, which has garnered surprisingly little media attention. Perhaps because it is erotica, a literary genre rarely taken seriously or even considered literary. Smith himself readily admits, “I don’t think Diana is a great work of art and doesn’t really deal with literary themes.” Sure there’s a plot, but as in all pornography it exists merely to transfer the reader from one sex scene to the next.
Diana suffered a rocky publishing start, originally written under the pen name “Diane Savage” (more for marketing reasons than Smith’s own reticence) and accepted for publication by the English Black Lace. Black Lace promptly wanted another 100 pages and proof that Diane Savage was in fact a woman. Women are the primary market for erotica, and they want erotica written by other women, for if it is written by a man it is supposedly inauthentic and perverse. Unable to prove he had anything more than a feminine side, Smith brought it to Gutter Press, a small publishing house that eventually fell apart not long after it published Diana, the two events not being linked. It was launched with meager fanfare, and within hours Smith was both outed as the author and mercilessly attacked ad hominem by a fellow critic. This summer, however, under the roof of Biblioasis and some 10 years after he actually wrote it, Diana has managed to sneak onto Calgary’s bestseller list.
The book was named for the mythical goddess of the hunt and not the Princess of Wales, as some unfortunate Amazon shoppers have discovered. It is a story of sexual exploration in all its lubed-up glory. It looks at people’s own squeamishness about sex and society’s fascination with it, but ultimately it was written to turn you on. It is dirty, voyeuristic and occasionally funny. For example, the title character and her guileless date go to a suburban swingers club and find those that dwell within are only sexy in a charmingly ridiculous kind of way. Later, as Diana gazes around an office, she muses that maybe everybody on the phone is in fact having phone sex. It also treads into the darkly risqué at a fetish club in what reads as a naughty marriage of Stanley Kubrick and Bret Easton Ellis.
Despite the central spotlight on fantasy there is surprisingly responsible condom use throughout. Smith insists this was less about exercising his social responsibility and more for the sake of realism and avoiding the criticism that would ensue if the prophylactics were absent.
Smith began the novel as a personal exercise after he found that he habitually avoided the sex scene in his writing. He describes it as “panning to the window” while the characters engage in clandestine carnalities. Smith, perhaps rightfully so, began to find this quite silly and decided that sex in most fiction is about relationships, so it is “ridiculous to excise it as if it weren’t important.” He encountered problems while writing it, primarily that there is a lack of language available to describe sex. One can either choose the clinical or the euphemistic, but either way, you run the risk of sounding ridiculous.
Nowadays Smith is embarrassed by how tame and dated Diana seems. If he were to write it again, he says, he would definitely make it a bit racier, but he is fairly sure it is not a genre he will have another go at, because he has truly “exhausted [his] ways of describing penetration” and admittedly, after 127 pages of assorted sex acts, I, too, was spent.
