The Pornographer

by McGahern, John; Enright, Anne

• ISBN13: 9781681378800
• ISBN10: 1681378809
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-09-10
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

By “arguably the most important Irish writer since Samuel Beckett” (The Guardian), a character study of a young resident of Dublin who pens erotica for a living, making his money through fantasy while denying the realities of love and sex in his life.

The Pornographer is the story of Michael, not a Dubliner but a resident of Dublin penning far from erotic tales to make ends meet. These tales—revolving around the “delicious, unending revel” of Colonel Grimshaw and the typist Mavis Carmichael—form a mordant counterpoint to Michael’s own, much more complicated existence.

Thirty years old, befogged by alcohol, sensitive yet indifferent to all emotional weather, Michael meets the slightly older Josephine, a clever, cautiously optimistic magazine editor who soon confesses her love, and though the feeling isn’t mutual (as Michael makes painfully clear) the affair goes on; Josephine becomes pregnant; and, this being Ireland in the seventies, the piper must be paid.

Not cruel but callous, Michael reels through his days, paying regular visits to a beloved aunt from the country who now lies dying in Dublin, and to his publisher, a citified and cynical Polonius who advises him to “be careful not to let life in.” As the days turn into months, Michael begins to wonder what letting life in might look like. What would it mean, and where would it lead, to do right by others?

First published in 1979, John McGahern’s fourth novel is a character study of rare and unsparing insight. In rhythmic, lyrical prose, McGahern gives voice to the longing and self-loathing of a soul caught between a traditional world he believes he has rejected and a brave new world of advertised freedoms, sexual and otherwise, which offers no guarantee of love.

Author Biography

Called “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett” by The Guardian, John McGahern (1934–2006) was a writer and novelist who has had an immense influence on contemporary writing both in his home country and abroad. He wrote six novels during his lifetime, the last being That They May Face the Rising Sun (published as By the Lake in the U.S.), which won Novel of the Year at the 2003 Irish Book Awards.

Anne Enright is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novel The Wren, the Wren. She received the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2017 and served as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2015 to 2018.