One of the great American stylists, he nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as "an immense whispering" was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time.
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One of the great American stylists, he nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as "an immense whispering" was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time.