The Pornographer’s Poem, the story of a boy who becomes early conversant in the unspeakable, is, by design, anything but poetic: it’s laid out in scuffed, unsmoothed blocks of first-person retrospection. And the narrator, whose name we never learn, doesn’t become the titular pornographer (he makes his first film at age sixteen) until slightly beyond the midpoint of the novel. The book is billed by its publisher as “push[ing] the boundaries not only of the novel form, but of sexuality itself,” and the departures from routine narration consist of occasionally scrambling the chronology in the early portions of the book, rendering some scenes as extracts from screenplays, inserting letters and journal entries, and frequently interrupting the narrator’s recollections by subjecting him to terse probing by a panel of unidentified inquisitors. As for its treatment of sexuality, the book is very earnest in its mission to shock the reader. Being sexually abused at the hands of an adult is treated as practically a rite of passage, kiddie pornography makes its queasy appearance, we witness the imperfectly concealed depravity of seemingly respectable citizens, and much is made of the dehumanizing effects of pornography on its makers, its subjects, and its consumers. It was shrewd of Turner to set the story in the 1970s, long before gross-out literature (one thinks of Dennis Cooper’s virtuosically obscene Guide) went mainstream and before tableaux of stupefying perversity, such as the flesh-pyramid photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, were splashed into the news hole of the dailies and weeklies. In the upper-middle-class precincts of Vancouver, where the narrator is coming of age, sexual derangement is still baffling and life-alteringly monstrous.

The narrator grows up steeped in apertural imagery:his mother has chronicled her fracturing family with exhaustive shutterbuggery, and in the seventh grade he is schooled in the rudiments of filmmaking by an obsessive émigré who gets cashiered for her classroom ardors. Small wonder, then, that when the narrator gazes out his window one sulky afternoon a few years later and enjoys a voyeuristic boon (the doper couple next door, taking the air on their balcony, are carnally engaged with their Great Dane), he reaches for his Super-8 movie camera and starts zooming. The sprockety result—a short subject of uncertain focus entitled The Family Dog—achieves cult notoriety among the local dilettantes. The narrator endures a Warholesque makeover, he and his reels make the rounds of the home theaters and salons...