THE PORNOGRAPHER

by John McGahern ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1979

Don't be misled by the title--you won't get cheap thrills from McGahern (Nightlines, The Barracks), an Irish writer whose very subtle eyes are always quietly looking into the almost imperceptible reversals of feeling and situations between people. The narrator of this understated novel is indeed a pornographer, churning it out by the page in Dublin for a syndicate; but he's also a sensitive man, with his favorite aunt dying horribly, with his own feelings of love anesthetized due to a recent jilting. Then, at a dance one night, he meets a woman--a bit older than himself, in her late thirties, sexually inexperienced but willing. They go to bed once, then again, then often. His porn, he thinks, armors him against expecting anything from sex but a cleansing and temporary brutality; yet the woman, with her maddening patient faith in their both being ""good people,"" waits for him to love her. He resists; even when she becomes pregnant, he refuses to marry her. Ever acquiescent, she leaves Dublin for London, to have the child there. And finally her very passivity is what traps him: the baby is born, she just waits, and though the narrator has wished life to be a matter of hydraulic satisfactions (like those won by his porn characters, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis), actual relationships, wherever he turns, immediately spread out and colonize into complexity. So, when his aunt dies, he knows he must truly decide about the woman (whom he can see now as a real, hesitant person like himself) and the child. McGahern works all this so very quietly, incrementally, that he risks bland clich‚ and obviousness: the story's simpleness is, ultimately, its hook. Sly, poetic, grim, unadorned--a fine book by a superior, almost invisible artist.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1979

ISBN: 014027796X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION