In the spirit of keeping things light at this time of year when the food and the body can start feeling just a little heavy, here’s the Guardian‘s update on one of my favorite annual awards—The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction.
You gotta love it, these laughable attempts to describe one of life’s greatest thrills. Ever since a writer friend confessed to me that she suffered from crippling fear while writing her novel that she would be nominated for this ignoble award, I have had a little more pity for nominees. Ouch. While of course some people treat it as just one more google hit.
At the end of the Guardian article I have also included an excerpt from Media Bistro’s GalleyCat blog flagging John Updike’s lifetime achievement award. The passage highlighted is just too good to not share. “Legs in an M of receptivity”…really John. John? Hello?
Thank you Sally Reed for being all over it and way ahead of me.
‘Slightly tortuous’: Alastair Campbell. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
Alastair Campbell’s depiction of a gauche sexual encounter in his debut novel All in the Mind has won him a place on the shortlist for the literary world’s most dreaded honour: the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.
Campbell would join luminaries including Tom Wolfe, AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg if he wins the award – a plaster foot – on November 25 at London’s aptly named In and Out club. Run by the Literary Review, the bad sex awards were set up by Auberon Waugh “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.
The former spin doctor may take heart from the implication that his debut is an “otherwise sound literary novel”. Campbell of course has some earlier practice in depicting sex, having written pornography for Forum magazine under the pseudonym the Riviera Gigolo early in his career, but a passage set on a bench has catapulted Campbell onto the list: “He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled around it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right,” Campbell writes. “Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure he was losing his virginity.”
But Campbell’s prose is considerably less purple than some of the other contenders for this year’s prize, including new age novelist Paulo Coelho for his novel Brida, in which the act of sex – on a public footpath – is described as “the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam’s body and the two halves became Creation”.
“At last, she could no longer control the world around her,” Coelho continues, “her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn’t strong enough to hold on to them. As if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning, she unleashed them, and the world, the seagulls, the taste of salt, the hard earth, the smell of the sea, the clouds, all disappeared, and in their place appeared a vast gold light, which grew and grew until it touched the most distant star in the galaxy.”
Historian Simon Montefiore is also a strong competitor, singled out for his first foray into fiction, the Soviet saga Sashenka, in which a formerly prudish Communist woman enjoys an encounter with a bohemian writer. “He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. ‘The blue veins are divine,’ he whispered.” And later: “He’s a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!”
Other writers in the running include John Updike, Isabel Fonseca, Kathy Lette and James Buchan, as well as first-time novelist Ann Allestree for her novel Triptych of a Young Wolf.
“It’s very heartening to see what a distinguished list of writers seem to be listed with me,” said Allestree. “I wrote the book because I had written memoirs and biographies, and thought every writer has to do a novel, it’s a force majeure. So I set off to do it, and thought I’ve got to put sex in – every novel’s got to have sex in it.”
She said her novel was “essentially quite a serious one”. “It’s about wolves,” she continued. “There is wolf sex, between my young wolf, my hero, and his girlfriend, who happens to be an Alsatian … they have hybrid sex.”
If an extract from Allestree’s novel – here depicting sex between humans, rather than canines – is anything to go by, she should be in with a good chance: few novelists successfully manage to combine soup and sex. “He raised himself to his knees and bent to roll his tongue around her weeping orifice. He was bringing her to a pitch of ecstasy when she heard Madame Veuve, on the landing, put down the supper tray. Whiffs of onion soup strayed over them as he engulfed her. ‘Don’t stop,’ she clamoured; she was nearly there, it was in the bag.”
Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review said there had been “quite a lot of variation” in this year’s shortlist in terms of how, exactly, the sex was bad. “There are some which take the sex far too seriously, like Coelho, and some which have a grating change of register, like Buchan, and others that are just slightly ridiculous,” he said. “The Campbell seems quite Alastair Campbelly-bad, in the slightly tortuous logical path the passage takes … and also, we wouldn’t pass up the chance to put Alastair Campbell on a bad sex shortlist.”
Last year’s award was given posthumously to Norman Mailer for his final novel The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is described as being “as soft as a coil of excrement”. “It was the excrement that tipped the balance,” admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, at the time.
Alison Flood
Guardian
And from Media Bistro’s GalleyCat:
Updike won the lifetime achievement award after being nominated four times over the course of his career. Here’s a link to Updike’s shortlisted passage from 2005 Bad Sex nominee, Villages:
“Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare a** to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.”
I belong to a writer’s group, where one member is writing bodice-ripper short stories which are embarrassing to listen to being read, and then to have to come up with a supportive yet critical commentary upon. i cringe and whinge and try to fake it -alas none too well, as I think good erotica is extremely difficult to balance out in writing. Not that i have ever essayed it – maybe i should, but i shudder at what might come out from under my typing fingers. Gotta try it though. i did, in a half-hearted way write an erotic thriller/killer short story, but found it rather funny in the reading.
I think it’s a good idea to have a walk of shame for bad writing of sex scenes. And it is somewhat entertaining. G
Love your title. Kind of adds insult to injury (but in a funny way). 8)
What a horrible thing to win, eh? But yes, good sex is hard to write.
G, it is daunting. I have never been tempted to even try but then again I am not a polyglot (writer and visual artist) like you. So yes it is fun to smirk at the “walk of shame” (love that!) that is this award.
YB,
Good sex is hard to write.
Good sex is hard to find.
A good man is hard to find.
Somehow they all seem related…!
Too true. But the harder question is who can actually write a good sex scene. I’d nominate Hemingway for Garden of Eden every time, but it wasn’t finished when he died and there’s too much talk about who played with the manuscript after. And I think Amy Bloom does difficult sex well–the older people in new relationship sex, the mother-son sex–because she knows what to leave out. There are others I like but can’t think of now–outlining immigration law is kinda sorta killing me.
Read _The Debauched Hospodar_, by Apollinaire — the breathtakingly successful winner of an early 20th century contest to write the dirtiest book ever. Read also _The English Governess_, by Miles Underwood — written as if in Victorian times but actually in the 20th century. It doesn’t get any filthier.
And, at this distance, one might as well be reading these things for bad sex writing as for good, since they are the deliberate and skillful transgressions of another era, thus, can remind one listening to a wax cylinder recording of Mary Garden singing. That is, they are not less for this, any more than Mary Garden is a lesser artist than a present day opera diva.
There are some books that would win both the bad sex writing and good sex writing awards, and those are the ones I like.
VV, we’re doing everything within our grasp to keep you from being killed by immigration law and other moribund topics.
Thanks E for these two books I do not know but clearly need to.
D –
I just can’t resist this one….thank you for putting a devilish grin on my face this weekend….
I have wondered why it seems so difficult to write about good sex. (Ok..I confess – I’ve tried!) Perhaps because even incredibly good sex can seem ridiculous if you think about it too much. Maybe it is in the verbalization that it takes to bring an outside party up to speed.
Wow – a good man, great sex, good writing – seems to me an impossible dream.
Thanks for helping me grow my list of books not to miss…clearly books with both good and bad sex win hands down.
~P
Thanks Pam, and good luck trying to capture it in words!