The longlist for this year’s Bad Sex Awards has been revealed. (via Complete Review)
Wait a Minute, I Thought Bad Sex Was the POINT of “On Chesil Beach!”
– November 23, 2007Posted in: Sex
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (Bat Segundo interview with Murphy)
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (Bat Segundo interview with McClear)
The opening paragraph of that article says that, among others, Iain Banks was nominated. However, among the nominees I could not find his name. Weird, huh.
Exactly, re: On Chesil Beach (not that, as you know, I *loved* the book).
There’s something creepy about this ha-ha-funny “award” that’s even creepier than Mr. Blackwell’s (or whatever his name was) annual “Worst Dressed List”. Is it merely an expression of the biological limits of literary style that this “Bad Sex” thing is usually given to male writers, or is some sort of thinly-veiled Puritanism at work? While admitting that some of the razzed passages have been awful indeed (Tom Wolfe’s still echoes), some were not at all, or were clearly intended as satire, and McEwan, whatever else his flaws are, can’t be bashed as an inept stylist.
Maybe they should re-title the prize “The Sex Is Bad Awards” and tattoo big red A’s on the guilty writers’ writing hands.