One of the banes of contemporary literature, in my opinion, is the obligatory sex scene, in which the aesthetic pleasure of fiction is interrupted with a blow-by-blow description of its characters\u2019 sexual experience.\u00a0 Setting aside the moral issues of a work aspiring to pornography, these scenes are almost always very badly written, even when attempted by an otherwise accomplished author.<\/p>\n
So Britain\u2019s Literary Review<\/em> gives an annual \u201cBad Sex Award\u201d for the worst sex scene in a novel with literary pretensions.\u00a0 (Ordinary trashy novels are not considered.)\u00a0 Previous winners have included John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.\u00a0 The purpose of the prize is\u00a0 to\u00a0\u201ddraw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.\u201d<\/p>\n This year\u2019s winner is so overwrought, so opaque, so non-erotic, that I don\u2019t think it will offend anyone.\u00a0 I think I can quote the passage after the jump without violating the G-rated standards of this blog.<\/p>\n