Op-Ed: Being dead’s not enough, as Mailer wins Literary Review award for 'bad sex'

For 14 years, the Literary Review has been awarding this prize. Frankly, I think it’s a blatant effort by critics to extend their reach into the afterlife. Mailer had various encounters with critics who’d arguably died before writing the reviews.

Most writers have mixed feelings about critics, mainly because the question whether they know what they’re talking about or not is rarely answered. Mailer was initially famous for his sexual references, probably because that was all the mainstream really noticed. So there’s some irony in one of the people who kept literature alive through its Verbose Period (roughly 1970- 2007) being hit for one of his sales angles. I’m hardly an expert on Mailer. I was in primary school when he hit the headlines, and by the time I was old enough to read him I’d started reading Heller. I’ve read a few bits and pieces, not books, and seen a few interviews. I also don’t pay a lot of attention to third party sex, for some reason. However, how much worse than the XXX True Confessions approach could it be? I’ve seen sexual passages which looked like Greys Anatomy, (the book, not the TV show), complete with Latin references and what could only be called a bad grasp of verbs, and what they do. I’ve seen some where the whole process read like folk lore, like it was something people used to do in the Olden Days before Playstation. Then there’s the Porky’s approach, frat stuff, the middle aged puberty approach, and the harrowing experience of otherwise good writers obviously not knowing what they’re talking about. In some cases it’s not even clear how the topic ever came up. I don’t know if you’ve ever read an English middle class writer obsessed with urinary sanitation; I suggest you don’t. Mailer could have written the phone book, describing its sexual life in detail, and not entirely deserved this particular award. As the BBC article says, I’m sure he’d have taken the award with good humor. But I can see a real practical use for the award, to scare off some of the dreck we seem to be getting buried with.