Aside: Like No Sex You've Ever Had

"Sexuality is all too often the territory of the sentimentalist or the pornographer, too seldom that of the visionary."

Clive Barker

The closest the publishing industry comes to formally acknowledging the existence of crappy novels is the annual "Bad Sex in Fiction" award, given by Literary Review each year. It's mission:

to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.

Many highly regarded literary wankers have been nominated for this award. Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux were nominated just last year. Tom Wolfe won in 2004, and got huffy and declined to accept it.

This year, the early money was on Tim Willocks ("fast-engorging privities" and "the folds of her matrix") and Thomas Pynchon, the only nominee to have appeared in the Simpsons (I can't in good conscience quote from the Pynch's bestial love scene). The Sun has more extracts, and an obligatory picture of a woman in lingerie acting disinterested while a man with fast-engorging privities seeks the folds of her matrix.

However it was the "bulging trousers" of first-time writer, Iain Hollingshead, that won the day. Squeezing the victory for all possible publicity value, Hollingshead wrote an article about how fscking proud of himself he is, while blaming his awfulness on England. He says:

Writing about sex is rather more technical, and less fun, than doing it. Either you descend into flowery metaphor or you indulge in the "naming of parts".

The sentimentalist or the pornographer, indeed. Hollingshead is incapable of doing either well, because in his winning extract he does it both ways.

Clearly, the pop-culture amusement of the award has overshadowed the seriousness of its mission, to the point where it's become cool to win it.

They really need a "Your Book Is Utter Shit" award, with the prize being the immediate cancellation of the book and a ten-year ban on future publication of any work. Then, we all win.