Norman Mailer Wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award

To say that Normal Mailer, who passed away the 10th of this month, was a giant of American literature is a bit like saying the Pacific Ocean is moist. The Naked and the Dead, which dealt with his service in WWII, was named one of the 100 best books in the English Language by the Modern Library. He helped found the Village Voice. The Executioner’s Song won him one of two Pulitzers. The Armies of the Night got him the other as well as and the National Book Award. This week, he was posthumously awarded the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction prize for his last book The Castle in the Forest.

Amber Pearson of the Daily Mail wrote, “The award was originally established fifteen years ago by literary critic Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, with the intention of drawing attention to the ‘crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’.”

Here in all its awfulness is one of America’s greats getting it entirely wrong. The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer (Little, Brown: 2007) pp. 67-68.

'Are you all right?' she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.

'All right. Yes. No,' he said. 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! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.