Please Hold The Shamans
It’s evidently BSD White Male Novelist day here at Sarah Wrote That.
From a shortlist including John Banville, Nick Cave, Amos Oz, and Sanjida O’Connell (the only woman of the ten shortlisted writers), Philip Roth has won the Literary Review’s 2009 Bad Sex Award for The Humbling, “a story of the seduction of a lesbian by an aging stage actor, which includes an eye-watering scene with a green dildo”:
“It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be,” writes Roth…
“Roth is very anxious about his description of sex,” said Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review of the extract… “But it’s the overcompensation that qualifies this passage for the award – the totems and shamans are an attempt to convince us that Roth’s leering is actually giving some vital anthropological insight.”
O’Connell’s entry, The Naked Name of Love, features “a young Jesuit priest who is taught how to love by a gifted shaman woman on the eastern steppes of Mongolia.”
So when plotting that sex scene—leave the shamans out of it.
In 2008, John Updike received a lifetime achievement prize after four consecutive nominations.
(Guardian link via The Awl)
