It’s the literary award no author wants to win, and this year it has gone to Tom Wolfe.
The Literary Review gave Wolfe its annual Bad Sex Award on Monday for his bestselling novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Judges said the book’s sex scenes were ”ghastly … inept … [and] unrealistic”.
The nearly 700-page novel is set at fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania, chronicling the bright, naive Simmons’s entry into a hedonistic world filled with heavy drinking and casual sex.
Reviews of the book have been harsh, but like most of Wolfe’s work it’s selling well.
He gained fame in the 1960s in the vanguard of the New Journalism movement with works including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff.
The Bonfire of the Vanities, his scathing satire of New York in the 1980s, was a top-10 bestseller of the decade.
The Bad Sex Award, in its 12th year, is intended to ”draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel”, its judges say. — Sapa-AP