Probably not the best award to win, Reuters Reports American author and journalist Tom Wolfe won one of the world’s most dreaded literary accolades on Monday — the British prize for bad sex in fiction.
The prize is awarded each year “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.”
Mmmmmm… delicious sex…
“But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now!”
Good goddess of love, I tell ya, that is some sensual, sexy writing! I’m so turned on right now, it’s scary! To hell with the library, I’m hitting a strip club! He had me at otorhinolaryngological. Nothing like a $10 word to describe the ear, nose, and throat. Anais Nin would be proud.
I’m waiting for the day that people wake up and realize that it’s not Tom Wolfe’s sex scenes that are boring, it’s actually Tom Wolfe who’s boring. I’d rather watch paint dry than read his stuff.
But you do have to stand in awe of Andre Brink, a runner up. Check it:
“(It was) like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I’ve seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end.”
A large exotic mushroom? Fork of a tree? What a pleasant way to describe the sexes, using fungus and lumber references. And then there’s the tideless sea. Oh, but wait, no it’s not tideless. Actually it has tides. Yeah, that’s it. No wait! It’s not only got tides, but damn it’s got powerful friggin’ tides! You could surf these tides! Surf’s up, dudes! And then there’s that windswept beach, which is obviously “ribbed for her pleasure.”
There’s no excuse for bad behavior. There’s also no excuse for bad writing. Who published this crap anyway?
NPR interview
Wolfe was recently interviewed for NPR’s All Things Considered, and he talked about how he wrote the sex scenes in a way that would make them seem distinctly unsexy. Apparently, he succeeded. I think this is the right link..