Updike Wins Bad Sex In Fiction, Lifetime Award



We kind of love John Updike. He looks so unabashedly joyous on the book jacket author's photo, like he cannot believe he is writing for The New Yorker -- me, a kid from the Pennsylvania suburbs! Clearly he is an amazing writer. Updike's essays and book reviews are breathtaking in their scope, which includes: biology, religious philosophy, poetry, world literature, the graphic arts ... And Updike's vocabulary is just unreal; even a sour lexicographical pedant like John Simon concedes Updike's intellectual supremacy. John Updike is a true American original.

The subjects of Updike's fiction, though -- polymorphously perverse suburban couples, often aging -- seem to shrink before the horizon of his talents. But those are our issues that we bring to the table. We love his sparkling, vivid prose but have always had a problem with the settings (University towns, the exurbs, auto dealerships in Pennsylvania).

But Updike is stylistically the heir to Nabokov, although their subject matter is vastly different (except, perhaps at the erotic nexus point that is Lolita). Even at his worst he is magnificent in his breadth. And if anyone can make a suburban car dealership bound, rabbit-like, into The Corsair's urban/urbane consciousness, it is Updike.

But, admittedly, we are having some trouble getting through his "The Widows of Eastwick," the sequel to the triumphant Witches -- again because of the subjects he works his magic upon. Imagining bodies coinciding that are less than taut and nubile is, uhm, a difficult cognitive leap.

And someone else thinks so, only a lot more intensely. From Bloomberg:

"John Updike’s sex scenes -- including a romp with a 'Widows of Eastwick' witch in a beachside motel room -- won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

"... Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 'to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.'

"The judges cited Updike for his 'unique achievement' after his latest novel, 'The Widows of Eastwick,' garnered a fourth consecutive nomination for the prize.

"'Good Sex or Bad Sex, he has kept us entertained for many years,' the judges said in a statement, quoting from a passage so redolent in lips, rubbing and 'deep throbs' that we blush to reproduce it here."