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DEL.ICIO.USBad Sex in Fiction Award
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, it was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it, so once again the Literary Review, a London magazine, has brought forth its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
I won’t keep you in suspense. This year’s winner is Norman Mailer, who died last month after a towering career and then got this.
“We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humor,” the judges said at a ceremony last week, and, seeing as how it’s Mailer, they may be right. He was “honored” for a sex scene in “The Castle in the Forest” in which Adolf Hitler’s parents conceive the dictator.
Much of the fun of the “Bad Sex in Fiction Awards” stems from their focus on serious, frequently literary, writing from our best writers, rather than picking on cheesy soft-core porn paperbacks. On the short-list (Brit-speak for “nominees”) this year was Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach,” which is about a bad wedding night, and Christopher Rush’s novel, “Will,” about Shakespeare, in which the bard rhapsodizes about his favorite aspects of Anne Hathaway with a little more specificity than we might like. Paul Theroux and John Updike have been short-listed in the past.
Sometimes, though, readers need to take the awards with so many grains of salt. Or saltpeter. Sometimes a talented novelist writes a sex scene because it’s his or her intention to evoke disgust, or make you think about what’s happening in a specific wayt. Such is the case with Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Absurdistan,” a deftly written book I highly recommend, even though the passage on the LitRev’s website is pretty gross. That’s the point. Same with McEwan’s “Chesil Beach,” and with a recent winner, Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”
Let’s keep this PG-rated, fellow heavy-breathers, but have you read any of the sex scenes mentioned here, and what did you think of them? How does a really detailed sex scene in a novel affect you as you’re reading it? Remember: PG-rated.
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