When I was an eighth grader at Kenwood Academy, a Catholic boarding school in Albany, NY, one of the hot books being passed surreptitiously among the students was Mario Puzo's The Godfather. What attracted our excited attention was not Puzo's depiction of a violent Mafia world but most specifically page 69 in which hot-tempered Sonny Corleone has steamy sex with a bridesmaid behind a door during a family wedding. If there was a Nobel Prize for Bad Sex Writing , that memorable scene would definitely be a top candidate.. Instead this year we have the 13th Annual Literary Review Award for Bad Sex in Fiction. Started in 1993 by the Literary Review's late editor, Auberon Waugh, to point out "the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel", this year's prize went to British food critic-turned-first novelist Giles Coren for his novel Winkler. Coren faced "stiff" competition from the likes of John Updike (Villages), Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown), Paul Theroux (Blinding Light), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores), but the judges cited as particularly nauseating his description of male genitalia as "leaping around like a shower (hose) dropped in an empty bath ." Better luck next year, boys!–Wilda Williams
LJ Reviews Social Club