Bad writing caught in flagrante delicto

Two distinguished American novelists narrowly missed winning Britain’s most dreaded literary prize Wednesday night. John Updike and Paul Theroux were among runners-up for the Bad Sex in Fiction award, given annually for the crudest, most contrived or most pretentious description of the sexual act in a novel published in the past year.

The prize given by the Literary Review -- a bottle of champagne and a gently embarrassing statuette -- was awarded to Aniruddha Bahal, author of the novel “Bunker 13.” Bahal was flown by his publishers, Faber & Faber, from Delhi for the occasion. The tall, handsome journalist accepted good-naturedly.

“I enjoy a laugh at my own expense,” he said, adding that he understood part of the prize included five women who would follow him to his hotel room.

The late Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review magazine, launched the award in 1992 in the belief, after 20 years of book reviewing, that so many novels were ruined by bad sex scenes. Pornography and erotica are not eligible.

The annual ceremony provides the most amusing literary party of the London winter. The In and Out Club in St. James’s Square was jampacked as actors read out the excruciating passages from the nominated works to groans and guffaws from the crowd of about 500.

It was no surprise that Updike, a second-time nominee, did not travel to London to hear aloud the lines from his latest novel, “Seek My Face,” in which the heroine, after an important encounter, displays the result “on her arched tongue like a little tachiste masterpiece.”

Neither was Theroux on hand to enjoy the excerpts from his “The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro,” in which a male character admires “the gleam of her body in the light from the Taormina streetlamps and the blistered moon” before being rewarded with the response: “[S]he moaned like someone being stabbed to death.”

The adventurous description of sexual congress in Bahal’s novel is evidence that in fiction, as in film, India has emerged from a long period of puritanism. Bahal is strong on automobile imagery: “She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot.” The phrase that probably clinched him the prize, however, was, “Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed.”

Rock singer Sting awarded this year’s prize, modestly admitting “a reputation for tantric sex.” He went on to define “bad sex” as “anything that takes place in less than four hours.” “I’ll take that!” cried a female member of the audience. Sting added that Anglo-Saxon sex “takes less time than to boil an egg -- a soft one at that.”

Past presenters have included Mick Jagger, Germaine Greer and Jerry Hall.

Metaphors are popular with writers trying to avoid anatomical or clinical vocabulary. Paulo Coelho, the international bestselling Brazilian writer, one of this year’s contenders for his novel “Eleven Minutes,” reached for the cosmic: “I felt that he was doing this not only to me, but to the whole universe.”

On the other hand, in her “Peyton Amberg,” New York writer Tama Janowitz drew inspiration from marine biology: “They lay glued together, starfish shriveled in the hot sun on a rock.” Janowitz found place in her text also for “legs squeezing ... as involuntarily as a jelly-fish pulsing through the water,” as well as “a bearded mussel attached to a rock.”

Presiding over the evening was Alexander Waugh, son of Auberon, grandson of Evelyn. The Bad Sex prize, he said, is not intended to be derisive. Its purpose is to call attention to “something being done badly. Sex in fiction simply doesn’t work.”