Bad Sex in Fiction Award - Norman Mailer

Mailer's first posthumous award is not a good one, but it is deserved.

From The Guardian UK:

When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. This year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has gone to the late Norman Mailer for a description of oral sex in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is likened to a "coil of excrement".

"It was the excrement that tipped the balance," admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, whose editorial staff judge the annual prize. "That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."

This is the first time in its 15-year history that the award - established in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it" - has been bestowed posthumously.

The judges took the opportunity to pay homage to Mailer, saluting the breadth and depth of his output alongside his pugnacity and joie de vivre, and entreating the guests at the ceremony, held as usual at the In & Out Club, in St James's Square, London, to raise their glasses to his memory. Asked what he imagined Mailer's reaction would have been on learning of his triumph, Womack declared his confidence that the author "would have taken it in very good humour".

Mailer was joined on the shortlist by seven others, but the final decision came down to a three-way wrangle between Mailer, Ali Smith and Christopher Rush.

In his novel on the life of Shakespeare, Rush came close to pipping Mailer at the post with his inexplicably nautical rendering of an encounter between Anne Hathaway and an alarmingly callow young bard who notes the lovely female body "rag[ing] and founder[ing] in the rising foam as I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches".

Smith incurred the judges' interest for a depiction of sex in which the protagonists are compared to a baffling and apparently endless array of inanimate objects - "We were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician ... we were the tail of a fish, were the reek of a cat, were the beak of a bird, were the feather that mastered gravity ..."

"Smith was a close contender," confirmed Womack. "From a literary point of view we took exception to the mixed metaphors."

Honourable mention went to Jeanette Winterson for her use of the phrase "silicon-lined vaginas".

There was disappointment, though, for Ian McEwan, initially viewed as one of the strongest contenders for the award following his longlisting for On Chesil Beach, a novel devoted to the horrors of bad sex, and in particular, messy premature ejaculation. His failure to make it past the longlist was the final setback in a frustrating year that also saw him lose out in October as Anne Enright scooped the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Here is the winning passage:

Extract From The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer (Little, Brown) pp67-68

Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!

Yep, a deserved winner. That's bad writing.

Tags: Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Norman Mailer, 2007, books, authors, awards, The Castle in the Forest, Guardian UK