Laura Miller:

For my part, I think I waffled the most about Jim Carroll’s “The Petting Zoo.” Obviously, the writing itself was pretty bad, but it got points for being substantial and detailed, and for what I can only call its sincerity. I’ve read some of the novels these excerpts were taken from but not others, and this was a novel I hadn’t read. I’m not sure what the history of Billy, the male protagonist, is, but I’m guessing he’s had some sexual experiences with men (paid, I’m thinking), although this is his first with a woman. The author is trying so hard to do justice to how sex with Marta affects his sense of his own identity. It’s a little absurd that it makes him feel manly when she essentially ravishes him, but teenagers often do think in this muddled, overwrought way, and sex is so monumentally formative at that age. This, to my mind, is one of the things literary writing about sex ought to do: describe not just the fact of sex, but the way how it happens changes how characters understand who they are.

Several of the other candidates we looked at were well-written (certainly better written than the Carroll) but too perfunctory. I don’t blame novelists for not wanting to write longer sex scenes, given the widespread discomfort with the idea evidenced by stuff like the Bad Sex Awards, but since this contest is meant to celebrate the ones who do, I did downgrade a candidate for not actually writing about the sex itself. To me, the Maggie Pouncey excerpt (from “The Perfect Reader”), whatever its other merits, doesn’t even constitute a sex scene.

Similarly, I like the Gertrude Stein thing that Jillian Weise is doing in “The Colony” but was too disoriented by her style to get much from the excerpt out of context. I love the line “I made none of my usual flourishes,” though!

My two favorite excerpts, Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” and James Hynes’ “Next,” are great at capturing the way an erotic experience can be shot through with ambivalence, as well as fleeting thoughts and feelings about unrelated stuff. Both are about men having sex with one woman while emotionally entangled with another. In the case of “Freedom,” the hurt and anger Walter feels towards his wife makes the much-anticipated tryst with his assistant less unequivocally thrilling than he hoped. It’s more funny and wry than hot, but it’s very true to that experience of the mind and heart racing to catch up while the body is charging full speed ahead.

In “Next,” Kevin’s lust is fueled by imagining that the woman who’s rejected him will see him with Lynda. One minute he feels only pleasure, the next he’s afraid they’re going to fall over the railing. He’s aware of every sensation — the music, his partner’s sweaty flesh — then he’s distracted by a shadow in the window. In this case, the ambivalence makes it hotter. It’s paradoxical: The two of them don’t care much about each other, which leaves Kevin free to pour all his frustrated erotic longing for the Philosopher’s Daughter into their fucking. One of the ironies of desire is that it’s often more powerful when it’s denied, and in a way this is both fulfillment and languishing in a single act. I love the combination of emotional intensity and physical detail, which are all reasons why it was my first choice.

Louis Bayard:

I was hard pressed to choose between the Hynes and Franzen excerpts because they were both human and painful and real. The Hynes gets points because it’s both hot (i.e., the only excerpt that actually made me want to have sex) and technically assured: that sly interplay, for instance, between the cab driver’s chattering and the erotic reverie. It’s exact without being mechanical, and its details are spot-on. I particularly loved the porch rail threatening to give way the whole time.

The Franzen excerpt very convincingly portrays a unique species of performance anxiety — a man trying to have sex as good as he imagines his estranged wife is having. A doomed business from the start, with that sad and devastating finish: He comes in his lover’s hand. Juvenility and senility in the same breath.

I liked the sensuality of Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered,” although it has a cinematic “prettiness” to it. I could see it being directed by Rob Marshall for a prestige Hollywood release. Joshua Ferris’ “The Unnamed” had two lines I took a shine to: “She moved under him with an old authority” and “They calmly restored respectability to the room.” Jennifer Gilmore’s “Something Red” had a very close appraisal of a man’s body, which you don’t often get in sex scenes. The Carroll excerpt was not just bad, I thought, but bad in that flatulent, sub-Lawrentian way (as the Lawrence allusion painfully underscores). “Unique female fragrance” … “masculine instincts” … “He intuited the resonance of its mystery and command … ” They’re fucking, OK? I will give my old copies of “Women in Love” and “The Rainbow” to anyone who can tell me how green eyes can press down rapaciously and how a tongue can be unfettered to the air. Or, for that matter, fettered.

Maud Newton:

The problem with these excerpts is that — and I didn’t entirely realize this until I started reading for the contest — the sex I respond to most in fiction is really fucked-up. It’s definitely not that I want to experience the anonymous sexual assaults of Nicholson Baker’s “The Fermata” (though I confess, I did think that book was hot, in its autistic way), or get involved with a porn-obsessed televangelist as in A.L. Kennedy’s “Original Bliss,” or abduct a man and use him as my sex slave, as in Rupert Thomson’s “The Book of Revelation,” but these stories stay with me because they reveal something incredibly dark and twisted and, to me, true about desire and obsession. I like fiction, whatever the subject, that exposes the surprising longings its characters harbor in their heart of hearts. Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place,” in the latest New Yorker, is a perfect example, though it’s not actually about sex at all.

Maybe because I overdosed on D.H. Lawrence and explicit pseudo-transgressive fiction in college, most of the (for lack of a better word) vanilla sex scenes that stay with me now are brief, vivid ones, as in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair, “when the narrator, Bendrix, remembers in just a couple of paragraphs having to muffle his lover’s “strange sad angry cry of abandonment,” lest her husband, in bed upstairs, hear her them through the partly-open door. Afterward Bendrix crouches on the floor beside her “and watched and watched, as though I might never see this again — the brown indeterminate-coloured hair like a pool of liquor on the parquet, the sweat on her forehead, the heavy breathing.” The reverie ends when they hear the squeak of her husband’s foot on the stair.

The Franzen scene was the most vivid and real of the ones we were given, and also the only one that, as Louis said of the Hynes, made me feel at all like having sex. I guess responses to people fucking in fiction are as inexplicable as attraction itself, so I’m not sure exactly what got me about the Franzen — some combination of the details about her body and his desire, the activity and the gymnastics, and the narrator’s intense arousal and weird dissociation, and maybe also (TMI, probably) the idea of a guy going on for so long and being so into it but never coming. The contrasts between the girl and the wife are masterful, woven in beautifully.

James Hynes is an amazing writer — in fact, we became friends years ago after I couldn’t stop praising his fiction on my blog; hi, Jim! — and this passage is well-done, but to me it’s a more technical feat, as in, I can envision what they’re doing, but, the insight into the narrator’s inner world notwithstanding, it’s hot like porn without the pictures. Lots of cock and cunt, plenty of energetic hammering on despite the fear of losing balance, but I don’t know enough in this excerpt about The Philosopher’s Daughter to care that she’s the one he really wants. I can’t see her, don’t have a sense of her. I want to feel his desire in a sharp, particularized way, the way I feel the confusion of the Franzen character.

Though I ranked it more highly than the rest of you, I agree with Louis that the Lee excerpt is too pretty, too cinematic. I read “The Surrendered” in a single day last year when I was in bed with the flu and remember very little about it apart from the scenes in the orphanage about the relationship between the man, the woman, and the girl depicted in this passage, and it was difficult for me to tell when judging how much of my rating was based on just this section and how much was about the residual feeling I had from reading it initially. I have also read the Hynes and Franzen, though, and parts of some of the other novels excerpted here, including the Gilmore and the Ferris, and don’t feel that familiarity impeded my judgment. (I should probably mention that I loved Ferris’ first novel, “Then We Came to the End,” and gave it a positive review and subsequently met him a couple of times.) The short bit from “The Unnamed” didn’t do it for me the way it did for the rest of you. I would guess the appeal is the urgency and the unlikely setting, but as with the Hynes I just didn’t feel it.

The Pouncey isn’t sexy — I agree with you, Laura — but I liked it more than you guys did because unlike the Carroll it was entertaining. As a night person who’s had the (fortunately long-past) experience of being with a morning person who wanted to pull open the blinds at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and go at it, I could relate to the narrator’s visceral aversion to that sort of thing and probably ranked the excerpt more highly on that score than I would have based on the sex alone.

Walter Kirn:

Since everyone has done such a good job analyzing the individual sections, I want to make a few general remarks on sex scenes in fiction. I still have a problem with them, even the “good” ones, because I find it fundamentally difficult to read dispassionate descriptions of an act that is always (or almost always) experienced passionately in life (even if that passion involves revulsion). Reading detailed scenes of eating or vivid evocations of cuts of meat without any accompanying hunger might be similar. Sex on the page, when its goal isn’t simply arousal — porn — just always feels odd and clinical and wrong to me. The excerpts that I find tolerable here — the Hynes and the Franzen — are basically comic scenes that reproduce in their narrators’ minds the same distance toward the encounters they’re engaging in that I, the reader, feel toward the narratives of the encounters. In other words, sex scenes with lots of awkward self-consciousness in them at least address the awkwardness and self-consciousness they engender. Still, it’s a one-note accomplishment and, to me, the Hynes scene and the Franzen give the same feeling, basically, and transmit the same ironic message: We’re most alone in our heads when we’re supposedly merging as bodies. Got it.

One odd thing I’ve noticed about sex scenes over the years is that the more nuanced and specific they are, the more alienating they are. What constitutes good writing in other realms somehow just doesn’t work in the realm of sex. My favorite sex scenes are the blunt, depersonalized, pornographic ones (Bret Easton Ellis is the master here) that allow me to fill in the sensory blanks myself. I almost always prefer something like “He fucked her hard” to a gourmet, gynecological, Updike-ean presentation of the various sights and sounds involved.

“One of us has to leave at six to pick up Eduardo at the airport,” he said. “Just want to note that.”

“What time is it now?”

He turned her very dusty alarm clock to check. “Two-seventeen,” he marveled. It was the strangest time he’d seen in his entire life.

“I apologize that the room is so messy,” Lalitha said.

“I like it. I love how you are. Are you hungry? I’m a little hungry.”

“No, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m not hungry. But I can get you something.”

“I was thinking, like, a glass of soy milk. Soy beverage.”

“I’ll get you one.”

She went downstairs, and it was strange to think that the footsteps he heard coming back up, a minute later, belonged to the person who would take Patty’s place in his life. She knelt by him and watched intently, greedily, as he drank down the soy milk. Then she unbuttoned his shirt with her nimble pale-nailed fingers. OK, then, he thought. OK. Forward. But as he undressed himself the rest of the way, the scenes of his wife’s own infidelity, which she’d narrated so exhaustively, came churning up in him, bringing with them a faint but real impulse to forgive her; and he knew he had to crush this impulse. His hatred of her and his friend was still newborn and wavering, it hadn’t hardened yet, the piteous sight and sound of her crying were still too fresh in his mind. Thankfully Lalitha had stripped down to a pair of red-polka-dotted white briefs. She was standing over him insouciantly, offering herself for inspection. Her body, in its youth, was preposterously fabulous. Unblemished, defiant of gravity, all but unbearable to look at. It was true that he’d once known a woman’s body even quite a bit younger, but he had no memory of it, he’d been too young himself to notice Patty’s youth. He reached up and pressed the heel of his hand to the hot, clothed mound between Lalitha’s legs. She gave a little cry, her knees buckled, and she sank onto him, bathing him in sweet agony.

The struggle not to compare began in earnest then, the struggle in particular to clear his head of Patty’s sentence, “There was nothing so wrong with it.” He could see, in retrospect, that his earlier plea that Lalitha go slow with him had been founded on accurate self-knowledge. But going slow, once he’d thrown Patty out of the house, was not an option. He needed the quick fix simply in order to keep functioning — to not get leveled by hatred and self-pity — and, in one way, the fix was very sweet indeed, because Lalitha really was crazy for him, almost literally dripping with desire, certainly strongly seeping with it. She stared into his eyes with love and joy, she pronounced beautiful and perfect and wonderful the manhood that Patty in her document had libeled and spat upon. What wasn’t to like? He was a man in his prime, she was adorable and young and insatiable; and this, in fact, was what wasn’t to like. His emotions couldn’t keep up with the vigor and urgency of their animal attraction, the interminability of their coupling. She needed to ride him, she needed to be crushed underneath him, she needed to have her legs on his shoulders, she needed to do the Downward Dog and be whammed from behind, she needed bending over the bed, she needed her face pressed against the wall, she needed her legs wrapped around him and her head thrown back and her very round breasts flying every which way. It all seemed intensely meaningful to her, she was a bottomless well of anguished noise, and he was up for all of it. In good cardiovascular shape, thrilled by her extravagance, attuned to her wishes, and extremely fond of her. And yet it wasn’t quite personal, and he couldn’t find his way to orgasm. And this was very strange, an entirely new and unanticipated problem, due in part, perhaps, to his unfamiliarity with condoms, and to how unbelievably wet she was. How many times, in the last two years, had he brought himself off to the thought of his assistant, each time in a matter of minutes? A hundred times. His problem now was obviously psychological. Her alarm clock showed 3:52 when they finally subsided. It wasn’t actually clear that she’d come, either, and he didn’t dare ask her. And here, in his exhaustion, the lurking Contrast seized its opportunity to obtrude, for Patty, whenever she could be persuaded to interest herself, had pretty reliably got the job done for both of them, leaving them both reasonably content, leaving him free to go to work or read a book and her to do the little Pattyish things she liked to do. Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction …

Lalitha kissed his swollen mouth. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of things.”

“Are you sorry we did this?”

“No, no, very happy.”

“You don’t look quite happy.”

“Well, I did just throw my wife out of the house after twenty-four years of marriage. That did just happen a few hours ago.”

“I’m sorry, Walter. You can still go back. I can quit and leave the two of you be.”

“No, that’s one thing I can promise you. I am never going back.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

“Yes.” He filled his hands with her black hair, which smelled of coconutty shampoo, and covered his face with it. He now had what he’d wanted, but it was making him somewhat lonely. After all his great longing, which was infinite in scope, he was in bed with a particular finite girl who was very pretty and brilliant and committed but also messy, disliked by Jessica, and no kind of cook. And she was all there was, the sole bulwark, between him and the multitude of thoughts he didn’t want to have. The thought of Patty and his friend at Nameless Lake; the very human and witty way the two of them had spoken to each other; the grownup reciprocity of their sex; their gladness that he wasn’t there. He began to cry into Lalitha’s hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand.

Excerpted from “Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen,” published in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Franzen. All rights reserved.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” among other novels.

She had her eyes closed. “Close the door,” she said.

He stood up and closed the door. She took down her pajama bottoms. He saw what she was doing and reached out for a chair and placed it in front of the door. He turned off the light and walked back to her as shadows began to assert themselves in the room. He climbed on from the foot of the bed and pulled her to him until her head left the pillow. A small spray of hair still clung there. She began to unzip him. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He couldn’t rule out one final treachery of the body, which if it had its way, he thought, would crown its triumph of cruelty by depriving him — them — of this too. But he overestimated its power, or underestimated his own. Or did they both want the same thing? Now was not the time to wonder. Now was the time to forget his body and to look at her. He needed nothing but the look she returned. Then she shut her eyes, and he shut his, and they began to concentrate. He found more strength in her than he expected. She moved under him with an old authority. He listened as she began to come, as she was coming, as the coming wound down to a long final sigh that accompanied a burst of static from the nurse’s intercom above the bed. He used the pillow to muffle himself. It was a two-minute triumph for both of them, and afterward they calmly restored respectability to the room.

Excerpted from “The Unnamed” by Joshua Ferris. Copyright © 2010 by Joshua Ferris. Reprinted with permission of Reagan Arthur Books.

Joshua Ferris is the author of “Then We Came to the End,” which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a National Book Award finalist. “The Unnamed” is his latest novel.

The following day, having returned to the orphanage, Reverend Tanner sat down next to her during the evening meal. June sat alone now, having agreed not to monopolize Sylvie’s company. She had completely forgotten about her conversation with Tanner on awaking that morning, her throat parched, her head fogged and aching, as if, like Hector, she had been drinking all night.

“How goes it, June? Is everything fine?” he asked. Sylvie was at a far table eating with the younger children. Hector was not present, being likely out in the field.

She could merely nod, not yet ready for his questioning. “You don’t seem terribly certain,” he said, though almost jocularly, as though he didn’t in fact wish to hear anything else.

Her memory of the previous night was a stilled curtain but its music now rose up in her chest and brought the skin of her neck to life, her cheeks feeling as though they were suddenly flushed. She thought Tanner would take her aside for an interrogation but all he did was brood a moment with a half-expectant, half-wary gaze and say brightly, “Well, I must be going. Good day, June.”

For days afterward she tried to determine what to do. All her considerations foretold only trouble if they should continue, and yet she found herself hoping for Reverend Tanner to spend an evening away again. It was like the hunger she didn’t suffer anymore, this grave sensation so resident that it took on its own life, its own existence, was the body within her body that now drew all her energies.

At fourteen her figure was at last changing, after being stunted during the war; since living at the orphanage she’d put on more than eight kilos, mostly on her thighs and hips and on her chest, which the older boys glanced at, but warily, fearing she might catch them and take it as a provocation to fight. She noticed this and sometimes she’d sit back wherever she was and make a show of closing her eyes, letting them look at her for as long as they wanted. She might even press her shoulders back, to accentuate the new fullness. Her doing so wasn’t in vanity or pride, or from the slightest interest in any of them; it was pure experimentation, a trial to determine how it felt to be an object of desire, and she found that the more she felt their stares the more her own desire fired, trebled, eventually took on its own reason.

So she stayed silent when in the ensuing weeks Tanner departed on his various trips, and waited for Sylvie to emerge from her cottage in the middle of the night. Whenever she and Hector let the oil lamp burn, June could see them glide over each other with a patience and tenderness that was the opposite of the jerky, horrid couplings she’d had to witness during the war. And though she was startled by the broad, taut ropes of his body, her eye kept resting upon Sylvie’s calf, her knee, the way her belly would grow shallow under his kisses and dip far enough below the spur of her hip that she appeared starved herself. She had the loveliest glow, the light seemed to stream from her eyes, from her half-opened mouth; nor did the illumination dissipate until well after they were done, when June saw her open a small black kit and remove a needle from its velvet-lined well. Hector did not take it himself but he helped her, binding her calf with the rubber cord and tapping her heel and then shooting her with the medicine that made her shiver and then go slack, turn a ghostly bone-blue.

When Reverend Tanner was present June would sometimes stay late with Sylvie in the back room. He allowed it enough times that after a while her presence after the generator went out became almost customary. They would all be reading, Sylvie and June in the narrow bed, Tanner in his own out in the front sitting room. He always retired earlier than they, and they took turns whisper-reading aloud by the oil lamp books from the army base library, children’s books but also others that Sylvie had chosen for her, “Little Women” and “Great Expectations” and “The Good Earth.” Sometimes June would ask Sylvie to read “A Memory of Solferino” to her and she’d refuse at first but always eventually yield, the passages entering them, June thought, with both pain and bliss like the medicine in the kit, and making them cling more tightly to each other.

One night June fell asleep there, and when morning came she awoke to find herself wearing one of Sylvie’s nightgowns and tucked in the spoon of her slumbering body. She carefully turned into her and took in the warm, round scent of her hair, the sour-sweeter one of her neck, and masked her eyes in the scant damp of her nightgown; then on succeeding nights she would pretend to fall asleep and then watch Sylvie slip outside to the chair in back with her kit, feel her when she returned, her weight seeming to have doubled as she fell against June’s chest. It was then that June waited, sometimes hours, for the measure between Sylvie’s breaths to lengthen, for her to descend further into deepest sleep. This happened almost nightly: she would turn, lie on her back. Her lips would soften and ease. If there was starlight or moonlight her face and long throat gleamed with its luminance, this woman an ashen statue, only half alive. Here was the only beauty in the world. And then one night June could not help herself; she pulled back the blanket as if it were the frail leaf of an antique book. Her hands crept to Sylvie’s throat, where her nightgown opened, and undid the mother-of-pearl buttons that ran down to the hem; she took them one by one, the near half of the nightgown falling away, exposing the whole length of Sylvie now to the cold night air. June touched the belly, grazed the lowest rib, the small, flattish breast no fuller than one of her own. The nipple pushed up between her fingers, as dense as clay, and without knowing what she was doing she put her mouth over it, closing her eyes. She couldn’t breathe again, her heart as if collapsed in her chest, this tiny leaden node, poised for Sylvie to protest, to stir. But she did not. Nor did she when June’s hand slid down and nestled in the burning cup of her long legs, not moving, nor stirring, neither wanting the other to wake.

Excerpt courtesy of Chang-rae Lee/Riverhead.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of “Native Speaker,” winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; “A Gesture Life”; and “Aloft.”  “The Surrendered” is his most recent novel. It will be available on paperback March 1.

“I’m heading out tomorrow.” “Why?”

“I want to see museums in the city. I can write it off. I want to see the MoMA.”

We went to bed. I went first. I picked the sheet from the floor and tucked it into the bottom corners. Grayson puttered in the kitchen. I pulled a slip from under the bed and put it on. The piano slowed and the room was quiet. I spread the comforter over the sheet and arranged the pillows. I crawled into the bed.

“You forgot to plug in.” He took the cord from the floor and connected it from leg to outlet. “What would you do without me to remind you?”

He climbed into bed. He waited until I was almost asleep. I was in that place, with my eyes rolled back, that liminal state, and wherever I was headed, the night had not happened. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, when I felt him on my back. I reached behind and felt for it. I had to find it through boxers and that wasn’t right; Nick didn’t wear boxers. Oh God, it wasn’t Nick. I snatched my hand back. I opened my eyes and saw my hand beside the pillow, saw my ring finger, saw a million nights of Grayson asking permission. Why was he asking? Did I always have to invite him? What did it matter if I had two legs if I had to spend the rest of my life inviting him? I remembered the evening. I saw the evening before me, we had been asleep, Nick had woken us, Nick had stayed, and it was obvious. What else happened? Was Grayson mad? Nothing else. He played music. He was leaving in the morning.

I wondered how he’d do it, if there would be him coming, as he usually did, on my stomach. He was breathing unsteadily. I wanted him to take control. He might do it. He might can. He rolled onto his back. He wasn’t going to do anything. He wasn’t going to, after all, do anything. I thought, of course, how exactly like you you are, you don’t do anything, who did I think you were? You’re not the one who does things. I have to do things, suggest them, plead for them, all the words, all the positions, all the recommendations, I do them. You can’t possibly take control. Is that it? You rolling on your back. Are we finished? You coward. “Honey,” I said. I wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep.

I heard the sheets rustle. He was taking off his boxers. He put his hands on my shoulders. He dug his fingers into my shoulders and turned me on my back. I thought, Of course, yes, where have you been? I’ve been trying to tell you, it’s good, we’re good, we’ll be fine, this is what I meant. I had no inclination to stop him or start him or help him or pretend. I said nothing. He hooked his thumb under the strap of my slip and pulled until it came unstitched. It made a noise. Then the other strap. He grabbed the slip at the neck and pulled it down. “Where have you been,” I said. He put his hand over my mouth. He pressed his hand over my mouth while he did it. I felt the pillow under my head. I thought, you can you can. He took his hand off my mouth. His hands were on either side of me. Palms flat on the bed. I said nothing. I made none of my usual flourishes. It was the most there I had ever been for him. His right hand moved. Where was it going? There wasn’t anything there to go to. I got up, propped my elbows on the pillow, to watch him. I saw his hand reach for it. Oh not that, I thought, not that, that’s not even there, don’t do that, it’s not even there, it’s not meant for anything, who is that, you can’t, please, not that. “You’re always into it,” he said in between. “You’re always — always — into it — why aren’t you — aren’t you — why aren’t you now?”

Credit: Copyright © 2010 by Jillian Weise from “The Colony.” Used by permission of Counterpoint.

Jillian Weise is the author of the poetry collections “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex” and “Translating the Body.” “The Colony” is her first novel.