THE PORNOGRAPHER'S APPRENTICE
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When a videotape shows up with a note talking blackmail, ADA Dale Cuffy knows it's a matter requiring an unofficial response — especially as the video catches him at an orgy with more than his pants down. Even worse is the fatal accident (in dying color) involving his wife, who appears to have instigated the crash, in disguise.
How are these scenes related? Who played witness, on-the-spot with a camera? Can Dale thwart the blackmailer and be sure of keeping secrets? Shauna holds the key: the identity of the pornographer and the name of his apprentice.
A narrative of operatic variety, The Pornographer's Apprentice dramatizes a young man's extreme and illicit gambit to satisfy his desire for one special woman — and how his friend's counterplot defeats his intentions. It is a story of sex and death, art and money, poetry and pornography, life's brevity and our yearning for permanence.
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"The Pornographer's Apprentice is in fact my first novel, despite having been published as my third in 2015. For many readers, it is probably tough to read and difficult to like. It is not comforting and tells a story that is opposite to "uplifting" or "hopeful," as those adjectives are conventionally applied to prose fiction. Its value is its honesty about desire, obsession, and passion, and how the power of those emotions can compel otherwise decent human beings to derail their lives and injure the innocent.
"The novel's present time is the mid-1990s, when it seemed (to me, anyway) that video pornography stepped out of the shadows and become basically acceptable for every adult to look at, if they chose to do so. Perhaps this attitude was always prevalent, or asserted itself much earlier (the '60's? the 70's? so-called "stag films" go back to the inception of moving pictures), yet suddenly it seemed that video porn was being discussed as something worth noticing, and being written about in publications like The New Yorker and Harper's. Of recurrent interest was porn's profitability: it was something like a multi-billion-dollar industry, unless I'm exaggerating its monetary magnitude from the same anguish that made me write about a literary scholar's self-reinvention as an amateur pornographer -- the titular pornographer's apprentice -- to earn the living he could not make teaching students about Shakepeare's plays. This premise readily led to a kind of depression when I considered the protracted effort and intellectual energy a writer must bring to bear in writing a serious literary novel -- what sometimes is called an "art novel" -- and the repetitive, banal sameness of porn, which requires nothing, really, except consenting adults, a functioning camera, and adequate light. And yet, our culture was so besotted with sexual exhibitionism, and voyeurism, that it was willing to pay, in aggregate, some billions of dollars for porn, while most novel-writers struggle to earn a living.
"I believe it must be impossible to read The Pornographer's Apprentice and fail to recognize that it was written in, and out of, depression. The question, then, is whether the book itself is depressing. I believe it is not, just as I belive that Moby-Dick, written as an antidote to depression (it's right there on the first page, folks), is a heroic accomplishment of a psyche in distress, fighting for its life by acting creatively in words. Like Ishmael, Milo survives his "hypos" (Melville's word) and the ruinous events into which his melancholy leads him. Neither is a heroic character, nor admirable as a "man of action," yet both are remarkable as men of thought. It is not necessary to agree with everything Milo, or Ishmael, thinks or says or does to find the story he tells interesting, even if that interest is based on "the fascination of the abomination" (Conrad's phrase).
"If you dislike strong sexual content in the novels you read, you should give The Pornographer's Apprentice a pass. If you can accept such content, or just tolerate it as an instrumental element of a complex narrative that explores psychological dysfunction precipatated by experiential trauma, brave-up and read."
-- John Lauricella