Not a few leather-bound classics stood prepared, if we may borrow a metaphor, to offer a doorknob to the lonely, the frustrated, and those in the throes of desperate inexperience. Once upon a time, of course, even bad fictional sex had a rough-and-ready social purpose. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.") I was her plaything, which she moved around.
(The Italian novelist Erri De Luca scooped up that honor, for a new translation of The Day Before Happiness: "She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. If the judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award are to be trusted, it was not the most flagrant example of writing in flagrante to appear in 2016. That hackneyed little hymn to domestic ingenuity comes from Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am, published this past fall. Then she re-wet the knob with her tongue and found its place between her lips again, pressing tiny circles against her clit, then just tapping it there, liking how the warm metal began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time." She felt the first wave of something good go through her, and her legs weakened. . . . She parted the lips of her pussy and pressed there, gentle at first, then less so, starting to spin the knob. "She raised one foot onto the sink and held the doorknob to her mouth, warming and wetting it with her breathing. Not for long will he be able to avoid an abrasive encounter with this sort of thing: A similar lesson awaits the young litterateur who insists that a good book should move not only the head and the heart but also the loins. We all recognize that the boy who develops certain notions about the compatibility of sand and skin from the swimsuit issues stacked next to his grandfather's BarcaLounger must soon discover the rough reality of forty-grit lovemaking. In theory, the setup seems the perfect illustration of the Reese's principle: two great tastes that taste great together.īut theory is not practice, and life, friends, is not a peanut-butter cup.
On the other hand, there's the novel, an artistic enterprise devoted to making verbal sense of mute experience. On the one hand, there's, well, sex, a source of mystifying pleasure and profundity that for most people rarely elicits any articulation other than a contented grunt, groan, or gasp. Sex in fiction, like sex on a beach, ought to be a no-brainer. This article appears in the March '17 issue of Esquire.