Post by fretslider on Nov 28, 2010 15:03:09 GMT -5
Posted for your benefit by the house pervert.....
The Bad Sex Award
The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010
If Jonathan Franzen's latest smash is still on your reading list, you might consider skipping pages 256 to 259. Having read them, I'm not sure I'll ever see wormholes or, more regrettably, dark chocolate in quite the same light. Freedom has much to recommend it, but for those few pages Franzen seduces himself away from the novel's plot with some feverish, wholly superfluous phone sex between a college kid and his school sweetheart.
It's breathless and it's bad – bad enough to have become a favourite for tomorrow's Bad Sex in Fiction award. Because never mind that a clitoris grows to "a protruding pencil of tenderness" eight inches long and heading someplace very, very wrong, it's also redundant. Though the prize flicks a whip in the direction of the "crude" and the "tasteless", it's the gratuitous that really sets pulses racing down at the offices of its administrator, the Literary Review.
Founded by Auberon Waugh 17 years ago, its hall of hot-faced shame includes John Updike, who won a lifetime achievement award, and Sebastian Faulks who, along with Tom Wolfe and last year's victor, Jonathan Littell, declined to claim the foot-shaped trophy in person.
Throw in celebrity presenters such as Mick Jagger and Courtney Love and this most English of prizes makes for titillatingly easy copy, brimming with groan-worthy double entendres.
Competition is invariably stiff and this year is no exception. Franzen's fellow contenders include Martian poet Craig Raine and repeat offender Alastair Campbell, who actually hopes to win second time round.
Rowan Somerville has been shortlisted for The Shape of Her, in which a man goes at it "like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with too blunt a pin", while in Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, sex is more workaday – like "grinding meal". Yet beyond the sniggering lies a more important mission. In delivering a sound public spanking each year, the prize asks the question: what is good literary sex?
In May, I debated that same topic with Howard Jacobson and Julie Myerson at a Foyles event chaired by the Observer's Rachel Cooke. We discussed Turgenev, Murakami, Bram Stoker's Dracula. No single passage did it for all of us, but what we could agree upon was this: sex takes place partly in the mind. All too often, writers focus exclusively on the physical. They'll get entangled in clothing or the slithery logistics of what goes where.
They're not the only ones. It's a fault that's symptomatic of our 21st-century approach to sex. We obsess over technique and props, making it into a kind of erotic workout and relying on evolutionary biology to explain away the rich mysteries of desire.
If bad sex in fiction is the kind that lacks context and narrative value, contributing to the development of neither plot nor character – well, there seems to be plenty of that in real life, too. As Waugh noted when Faulks won: "Most sex is bad sex. It's the great discovery of our time." That was a dozen years ago. It doesn't seem as if much has changed.
Last week, someone in the know suggested to me that the prize's days might be numbered. Even the most torrid love affairs must come to an end, but it would seem sad if this prize were to quit just yet. Though it castigates, it also celebrates, providing a necessary reminder of what good sex – both on and off the page – is all about.
The Bad Sex Award
The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010
If Jonathan Franzen's latest smash is still on your reading list, you might consider skipping pages 256 to 259. Having read them, I'm not sure I'll ever see wormholes or, more regrettably, dark chocolate in quite the same light. Freedom has much to recommend it, but for those few pages Franzen seduces himself away from the novel's plot with some feverish, wholly superfluous phone sex between a college kid and his school sweetheart.
It's breathless and it's bad – bad enough to have become a favourite for tomorrow's Bad Sex in Fiction award. Because never mind that a clitoris grows to "a protruding pencil of tenderness" eight inches long and heading someplace very, very wrong, it's also redundant. Though the prize flicks a whip in the direction of the "crude" and the "tasteless", it's the gratuitous that really sets pulses racing down at the offices of its administrator, the Literary Review.
Founded by Auberon Waugh 17 years ago, its hall of hot-faced shame includes John Updike, who won a lifetime achievement award, and Sebastian Faulks who, along with Tom Wolfe and last year's victor, Jonathan Littell, declined to claim the foot-shaped trophy in person.
Throw in celebrity presenters such as Mick Jagger and Courtney Love and this most English of prizes makes for titillatingly easy copy, brimming with groan-worthy double entendres.
Competition is invariably stiff and this year is no exception. Franzen's fellow contenders include Martian poet Craig Raine and repeat offender Alastair Campbell, who actually hopes to win second time round.
Rowan Somerville has been shortlisted for The Shape of Her, in which a man goes at it "like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with too blunt a pin", while in Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, sex is more workaday – like "grinding meal". Yet beyond the sniggering lies a more important mission. In delivering a sound public spanking each year, the prize asks the question: what is good literary sex?
In May, I debated that same topic with Howard Jacobson and Julie Myerson at a Foyles event chaired by the Observer's Rachel Cooke. We discussed Turgenev, Murakami, Bram Stoker's Dracula. No single passage did it for all of us, but what we could agree upon was this: sex takes place partly in the mind. All too often, writers focus exclusively on the physical. They'll get entangled in clothing or the slithery logistics of what goes where.
They're not the only ones. It's a fault that's symptomatic of our 21st-century approach to sex. We obsess over technique and props, making it into a kind of erotic workout and relying on evolutionary biology to explain away the rich mysteries of desire.
If bad sex in fiction is the kind that lacks context and narrative value, contributing to the development of neither plot nor character – well, there seems to be plenty of that in real life, too. As Waugh noted when Faulks won: "Most sex is bad sex. It's the great discovery of our time." That was a dozen years ago. It doesn't seem as if much has changed.
Last week, someone in the know suggested to me that the prize's days might be numbered. Even the most torrid love affairs must come to an end, but it would seem sad if this prize were to quit just yet. Though it castigates, it also celebrates, providing a necessary reminder of what good sex – both on and off the page – is all about.