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Christopher Bollen.
Difficult kiss … Christopher Bollen. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Difficult kiss … Christopher Bollen. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Bad sex award won by Christopher Bollen's phallic 'billiard rack'

This article is more than 6 years old

Passage from novel The Destroyers singled out by judges of dubious honour for ‘going overboard in its attempts to describe the familiar in new terms’

An overenthusiastic attempt to “describe the familiar in new terms”, which led to the male genitals being portrayed as an anatomically confusing “billiard rack”, has won the American author Christopher Bollen the Literary Review’s annual Bad sex in fiction award.

Bollen’s The Destroyers, a literary thriller that Jay McInerney said “invokes the shades of Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene”, beat titles by the bestselling Wilbur Smith and the award-winning Laurent Binet to the prize.

Judges said they were persuaded to give Bollen the award by a scene in which the protagonist Ian and his former girlfriend are rekindling their relationship on the island of Patmos.

“She covers her breasts with her swimsuit,” writes Bollen. “The rest of her remains so delectably exposed. The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles.”

The Literary Review said: “The judges felt that there are parts in the book where Bollen goes overboard in his attempts to describe the familiar in new terms, leading occasionally to confusion. In the line quoted … they were left unsure as to how many testicles the character in question has.”

The author lives in New York City. He has written two previous novels, and is the editor-at-large at Interview magazine.

“In the week that Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle, it seems only fitting that Britain’s most eligible literary prize has been snapped up by an American,” said the Literary Review, praising the strong competition provided by the shortlist. “The judges are perpetually amazed by the outlandish lengths authors will go to in order to catch their attention.”

The magazine cited strong contenders for the prize, including The Seventh Function of Language by Prix Goncourt-winner Binet (“Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a steel forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine”); Venetia Welby’s Mother of Darkness (“The green grass curls around Tera’s left breast as she curves her sleek physique around Matty’s diabolical torso like a vine. Paralysed, complete, the marble statue of the lovers allows itself to be painted by the dawn’s lurid orange spillage”); and War Cry by Wilbur Smith (“He kissed her and she responded and the boundaries between them blurred, like two watercolours on a piece of paper, joining as one to create something entirely new”).

Previous winners of the Bad sex prize include Giles Coren, Rachel Johnson, and Norman Mailer. Coren, who, like Bollen, stumbled over his description of male genitalia, writing that it was “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”, took the win in good spirits, saying of the other shortlisted passages: “I wish I’d written them all.” Others have been less sanguine. Tom Wolfe, who won for a passage from I Am Charlotte Simmons featuring the line “slither slither slither slither went the tongue”, boycotted the ceremony, saying that judges had failed to grasp his irony.

“There’s an old saying – ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing’,” Wolfe told Reuters. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”

The award, which aims to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”, was presented, in Bollen’s absence, by Carry On star Fenella Fielding.

Despite suggestions that the prize “might be having an effect” in raising the general standard of writing about sex in fiction, organisers said that judges were kept busy with dozens of nominations. “Although we found lots of good sex [in fiction] this year, that doesn’t mean the bad sex was gone … There’s still plenty of room for the prize,” said the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley. “But perhaps it means that some of the serial offenders have learned their lessons.”

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