The Pornographer differs from McGahern's Amongst Women or That They May Face the Rising Sun in that the canvas of emotions and relations it explores is more restricted than either of those two books. Nevertheless, it has McGahern's characteristic fine writing, descriptive power, and exploration of the complexity of human emotions and relationships.

Michael is a young man living in Dublin, making a comfortable living writing steamy novellas about the Colonel and Mavis who go at it like rabbits every chance they get in all sorts of exotic, and not-so-exotic locales. Michael has been disappointed in love and in his off-time, of which he has quite a bit, he cruises the dance hall and bars for satisfaction in one-night stands. He meets a challenge with Josephine who is 38 and beautiful, and not very experienced sexually, but who takes to sex with a passion. Unfortunately for Michael, Josephine falls quickly in love and begins to plan a future together, all of which is considerably complicated by her pregnancy. Michael maintains throughout that he will do "what is right" in terms of support during the pregnancy (he fortuitously manages to avoid marriage), but he is steadfast in that he does not love Josephine, he does not love or want the child, he will have nothing to do with the child, and once the child is born, he will have nothing to do further with Josephine.

Michael is not a bad man; he is friendly, outgoing, comfortable with his life. He is very good to a dying aunt, visiting her regularly in the hospital and constantly supplying her with brandy which she prefers to pills to dull the pain. However, his visits develop a sense of routine or obligation and he is often uneasy and relieved to leave though he feels guilty afterwards.. He is also good with an uncle (not the wife of his aunt). His problem is an inability to connect and to ground himself at the emotional level. He writes in purple prose about the act of sex, and certainly enjoys it himself, and would probably bristle at the suggestion that he seems incapable of sympathy, much less empathy. He picks up a woman while Josephine is in England to have the baby and begins a sort of relationship with her, but is unable to see his way clear for either himself or with this woman.

However, his experience with Josephine, the death of his aunt, his feelings for the new woman, his deeper revaluation of his life lead Michael to a new openness, an awareness of how he has blinkered his life, and more optimism for the future:

By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who'd agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back, let the light of imagination almost out. Now my hands were ice.
We had to leave the road of reason because we needed to go farther. Not to have a reason is a greater reason still to follow the instinct for the true, to follow it with all the force we have, in all the seeing and the final blindness.

A good novel by a fine writer.