The Effort of Bad Writing

Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence. As the great W. Y. Tindall once wrote,

Gudrun dances, for no reason, before cows. They understand. Even Hermione, that intellectual, has her moments. In voluptuous consummation with violence, she hits Birkin on the head with her paperweight. He goes off to lie among the flowers and, on returning to full consciousness, approves of her momentary triumph over repression.

Or as Andy Bienen, my grad-school colleague turned screenwriter, more pithily put it, "It's like someone put a gun to Nietzsche's head and made him write a Harlequin romance." No question, it took a lot of effort to produce a book that bad.