In 1995, American author David Guterson won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his incredibly popular novel, Snow Falling on Cedars.
In 2011, American author David Guterson won the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction "Award" for his not-quite-so popular novel, Ed King.
Beating the likes of Haruki Murakami, Sebastian Barry, James Frey, Peter Nadas, Stephen King and Jean M. Auel, Guterson's modern take on the Oedipal tale sees a son making love to his mother in some of the clunkiest, most awkward prose possible.
Using phrases such as "front parlor", "back door" and "modest marble membrum" and ending with the line "...then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch", it's available to read below.
Guterson joins the hallowed ranks of John Updike, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer in a list of tge other esteemed authors to win the prize over its 14 years existence.
But what's Guterson's take on all of this? A pretty funny quip, to be honest: "Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I'm not in the least bit surprised..."
Touché, Mr. Guterson, touché...
Extracts from the winning novel can be read below (NSFW):
How wonderful it was – wonderful and surprising – to be attracted to a guy, to want sex. Diane found, once she was naked with him, that there were things she really liked in his performance, including, foremost, that he was relentlessly, acutely, even obsessively servile. It was fine with Ed to spend a half-hour massaging her feet and squeezing her ankles, followed by nearly equal devoted caressing of her shins and calves; next, moving up, he gave substantial attention to her knees and thighs, and when, in her massage trance, she hoped and believed that his hands would surely go where they would do the most good, Ed didn’t go there, he flipped her over instead and massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders, neck, back, and butt. ... It triggered memories with the uncanny force of déjà vu, and what she thought of, as Ed slaved away, was a boy from her village who had fingered her adroitly in a greenhouse thick with green tomatoes.
In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. After a while he shut his eyes, and Diane, wielding her fingernails now and starting at his face, helped him out with two practiced hands, one squeezing the family jewels, the other vigorous with the soap-and-warm-water treatment. It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.