A Hard Choice: Worst Sex Writing goes to....

       Steve Martin once said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and I kind of feel the same way about sex. Some music you just have to hear, some dishes you just have to taste and some intimacies you can’t describe. Words are as insufficient to convey them as a Ford Fiesta would be to convey the Pieta.

       If you have ever tried to write sex scenes you know how tough this is. I’m not talking about the digital mash notes we all occasionally fire off to some lucky winner, I’m talking about using words to do the jobs hands, lips and a couple of boxes of wine are usually employed to do. Sex scenes are murder to write convincingly. I write about sex every day but mainly from a removed, observational, my-isn’t-that-interesting POV, like Bill Bryson writing about the Australian box jellyfish. Much easier to put it to someone in person than on paper.

       Some people, god love them, will try, though. Some will end up with book contracts. Some won’t. And a very unlucky few will end up the recipient of an unkind superlative: the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award..

       Nobody wants to win the Bad Sex in Anything award, but I’m afraid this year's honor goes to American novelist Jonathan Littell for his intriguing analogies in “The Kindly Ones,” a Holocaust story told through an executioner’s eyes. It should be noted tout suite that Mr. Littell has nothing to worry about– the book has sold over a million copies in Europe and won France’s highest literary honor. Even some really beloved writers, though, can’t necessarily write sex. Case in point: past recipients have included Tom Wolfe, A.A. Gill and John Updike, who scored last year’s Lifetime Achievement award. It’s a tough, tough racket.

       But onward and downward to the two passages that nicked Mr. Littell this dubious distinction. What I’m going to do here is place them before you in a Mad Lib context – you fill in some of the words and see what you come up with. Then see if what he came up with was worse. Ready? Here’s one passage:

 “I came (adverb), a jolt that (verb, past tense) my (noun) like a (noun) scraping the inside of a(n) (adjective) (noun).”

       Yeah, I know. “Scraping” should never be going on in a sex scene, should it? It invites nightmares. SPOILER ALERT! Here’s the actual passage:

       “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

       Ew.

      Here's a really long passage, if you're interested. I have to admit, it’s pretty surreal at least and makes you wonder, when he describes a vulva has being “like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks,” just who was the saucy little minx who inspired that?