Jonathan Franzen on Shortlist For Another Award
America’s great literary hope, Jonathan Franzen, has once again made the shortlist for another award. Franzen has been added to the Bad Sex in Fiction shortlist for his newest novel Freedom
According to this Huffington Post article, Franzen is on the shortlist because:
The scene in Freedom that attracted the judges’ attention was a phone sex encounter between two characters. While the passage is over-the-top in context, it becomes downright garish when excerpted — so much so, in fact, that I couldn’t bring myself to reprint even a sentence of it here. My favorite part, however, is Franzen’s wonderfully descriptive phrase, “protruding pencil of tenderness.” Use your imagination.
The phone sex scene for which Franzen was nominated was not in the Huffington Post article, but I managed to find the excerpt in this Guardian UK article:
One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate.
Ugh. Definitely not my cup of tea.
I like Franzen’s books. I’ve read The Corrections and plan on reading Freedom. Kudos to Jonathan Franzen. Although I’m sure this is not an award he wants to add to his collection.
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