PG-13

"Perhaps it isn't too late for John Updike to bag a Bad Sex award," wrote Adam Mars-Jones in his Observer review of Villages at the beginning of the year. The longlist for this year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, announced last Friday, confirms that Mars-Jones's prediction was on the money.

Updike is in the running for what the organisers call Britain's "most dreaded literary prize", with an extract from Villages in which an adulterous character appraises his lover's v@gina: "[it] did not feel like Phyllis's. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze": Guardian Unlimited Books:Stiff competition for Bad Sex award

"Less of a sauce, more of a glaze"?! The implications of that... 69 flavors of love? Yeah, baby, I'll butter you up, I'm the Iron Chef. "She tensed as she came closer and closer to the Maillard reaction of ecstasy...."

Good Lord. And look at all these big-shot authors:

But, excruciating as his entry is, Updike is up against some stiff competition. Among the 11 contenders for the prize this year are some of the biggest names in literature, including Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Of the three, Theroux's offering, from Blinding Light, is arguably the most deserving of the prize, with its description of a character's orgasm as

"...not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his..."

A demon eel! So do you call a vet or an exorcist about that?

The article links to a list of all the nominated passages, but I've got to stop. I'm laughing so hard it's frightening the rat.