Product Description

The narrator, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world in his book, while he bungles his own affair with an older woman who falls in love with him. His insensitivity to this love is in contrast to the tenderness of his attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80265 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

Review
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 cliche and obviousness: the story's simpleness is, ultimately, its hook. Sly, poetic, grim, unadorned - a fine book by a superior, almost invisible artist. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Not what you might think...
The Pornographer is a book which was first lent to me by a friend. I confess it is not a book I thought i'd be interested in but by the end of the first chapter I was hooked. It is a story about love, life, death and the quest for happiness and fulfilment. MacGhern's writing is moving and convincing, especially when writing from a female perspective (something which most modern male writers could learn from and an aspect of the book which impressed me). It will keep your interest till the last and it's well worth the cover price.

I've recommended it to sevearal friends and they have all enjoyed it - no mean feat considering most were put off by the title. This is a book about relationships of all kinds, intimate, familial, friend and natural.

But it and see what you think!