We have a double winner!
In an undated book-of-the-month-club brochure found in a second-hand copy of John P. Marquand’s 1943 So Little Time, Henry Seidel Canby walks off with both the Unhelpful-Metaphor Award and the Prose-That-Should-Never-Have-Been-Written Award:
Mr. Marquand is the Sinclair Lewis of a slightly younger generation, which does not mean that he resembles Sinclair Lewis except in the kind of services he renders in American literature. Let us say that Lewis put vinegar and the vitamin X of satire into the fiction of the 1920’s; while Marquand sprinkles what seems to be sugar, but is actually salt, on the viands of the 1940’s, and injects the vitamin Y of irony into the veins of his readers.
Ah, must we say that?
Apt.
Holy crap I have no idea what you’re on aboot.