An author needs to provide some kind of hook for the reader and an easy one can be provided by sex. So a great number of writers take the easy route. I was asked by my UK publisher to sprinkle The Tailor’s Needle with some sex scenes, which I enjoyed doing. D. H. Lawrence gave a spiritual theory of sex in fiction. He believed that in the Modernist world man was cut off from nature in so many ways; he slept indoors, ate cooked food, a coal miner hardly came into contact with sunlight, and so on. Sex was his only real link with nature. Hence Lawrence’s novels made a religion of sex. They were often first banned and then included in literary cannons to be finally prescribed for literary study.

Sex is a very private affair. Hence when an author decides to show sex, he has decided to take you into the most personal moments of characters that inhabit the world of fiction. Since sex is a human need and since it is something everyone desires, it naturally involves the imagination of the reader. Fiction has the power to draw a reader’s imagination in such a way that the reader begins to identify with and participate in whatever the protagonist does or wants to do. Though sex may not always be the very best way of bringing the reader and character to the point of identification, it could easily be an apt way of doing so. There are drives in people, of a superior kind, more pressing than sex, that lead them on and sex can drive only some characters in a novel towards their unfolding in the plot. But sex can be an agent of transformation in a character, revealing the character’s weakness or strength. If used effectively, sex can add very substantially to the depth of a novel. Freud gave much importance sex in his understanding of people. The novelist may similarly do so. Freud’s theories are so useful for novels that they can turn out to lie at the core of human psychology and behaviour.

Sex can be used fruitfully in fiction. But it should be used only when there is real need for it in a scene. The temptation to use it frequently can be great in an author but that can ruin a novel. It must therefore be there in the novel but in proportion to its need in life.