It’s the end of fall, and you know what that means. Okay, yes, NaNoWriMo is over–but I’m talking about the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It’s a shame the Literary Review doesn’t select runners-up, as each of their selections was capital-B Bad in its own special way. So here are my votes for superlatives. Check to be sure your boss isn’t around and get ready to cringe.
Most Explicit Play-by-Play: from Philip Roth’s The Humbling
First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy’s lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down a ways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo.
Most Overwritten: from John Banville’s The Infinities
They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense. His heart rattles in its cage, a vein beats at his temple like a slow tom-tom. When they are spent at last, and that beacon in the jungle has been turned low again, they lie together contentedly in a tangle of arms and legs and talk of this and that, in their own languages, each understanding hardly a word of what the other says.
Most Strained Analogies: from Amos Oz’s Rhyming Life and Death
She holds him tight and squeezes her body to his, sending delightful sailing boats tacking to and fro across the ocean of his back. With her fingertips she sends foam-flecked waves scurrying over his skin… [H]e starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port, to the deepest anchorage, right to the core of her pleasure. Attentive to the very faintest of signals, like some piece of sonar equipment that can detect sounds in the deep imperceptible to the human ear, he registers the flow of tiny moans that rise from inside her as he continues to excite her, […] as though he has been transformed into a delicate seismograph that intercepts and instantly deciphers her body’s reactions, translating what he has discovered into skilful, precise navigation, anticipating and cautiously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef, smoothing any roughness except that slow roughness that comes and goes and comes and turns and goes and comes and strokes and goes and makes her whole body quiver.
Strangest Food-Sex Comparisons: from Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munroe
Bunny’s considerable member retains a certain curiosity – it must be said – but the rest of him feels wholly disembodied, as if it attaches no intrinsic value to the matter at hand. He feels like the flenched blubber a butcher may trim from a choice fillet of prime English beef and, as the song says, he has never felt this way before. This is completely new territory for him. He can see that the hard globes of River’s breasts are perfect and better than the real thing and he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice Jelly Spogs, or stick his finger in her arsehole or something, but realises with a certain amount of satisfaction that he can’t be fucked and he lets his arm drop to the side.
Most Personifications of Sexual Organs: from Richard Milward’s Ten Storey Love Song
Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.
The winner, announced by the Literary Review November 30, was Jonathan Littell for a passage from The Kindly Ones. I can’t excerpt AND still do the Badness of this passage justice, so let’s just say it involves a guillotine, a soft-boiled egg, a sow nuzzling for truffles, and a Cyclops.
Read all the shortlisted excerpts, in their entirety, here, and check out the Guardian’s analysis of the shortlist here.
