It is that time of the year again, and the Literary Review has announced its nominees for the Bad Sex award, given out to those authors who foolishly include “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels” (the latter part of which is actually rather a compliment, albeit a backhanded one).
This year’s list includes a couple of Bookkake’s favourite novels from the past 12 months, including Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (”I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”) and Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro (”he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.”).
The Guardian has the full collection, with extracts. Meanwhile, Boldtype magazine has compile its own All-Time Top 10, with perennial favourite John Updike topping the bill. (You may remember him being commended for lifetime achievement at last year’s Bad Sex awards.)
Unsurprisingly, we at Bookkake believe there’s too little sex in literature. But we still have a soft spot for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, established by Auberon Waugh in 1993 to “gently dissuade” authors from including “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”. This year’s winner was Rachel Johnson (sister of London mayor Boris), for a passage including such gems as these:
“I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me.
“I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance…”
Her novel Shire Hell was singled out by the judges for its superlative “mixture of cliche and euphemism” and “a couple of really bad animal metaphors”. But we were also pleased to see the don of Bad Sex writing, John Updike, honoured with a lifetime achievement award.
Dan Chiasson, writing in the New York Times a few months ago, called Updike’s poem “Fellatio” “perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject,” and we’d hardly argue:
How beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched with seed,
flower into her landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.
Taking the piss out of bad literature is an easy - and dangerous - game, but we’re all for the war on cliche and, particularly, euphemism. “Plowed earth stinking” indeed.
