The framework for Michael Turner’s novel The Pornographer’s Poem is that of an interview with an unnamed male narrator, the maker of pornographic films in Vancouver. An iconoclastic auteur, transgressor of the boundaries between pornography and art, imparting wisdom to graduate film students? Or a perpetrator undergoing an interrogation?

Within the Q and A format Turner serves up a feast of forms. Letters, film treatments and scripts, diary entries, monologues, and conventional narrative tell the flashback tale of the narrator and his friend Nettie, two upper middle-class WASP teens sleuthing the socially constructed nature of desire. Claustrophobia and confinement are almost characters in themselves as Turner skillfully sustains a sense of urgency from start to finish (though the absurdist ending won’t be to every reader’s taste). While Turner purveys a variety of formal devices, much of the novel is told in chunks of expository prose and clumsy voicings that only occasionally lift into dynamic, elegantly vernacular riffs. What sings most is an acute empathy for society’s outsiders, portrayed with a baleful recognition of the privileges that race and social class engender.

And yes: the sex is good. Turner dishes sexual depiction stripped of noirish cant to offer a thoughtful take on both the classic male coming-of-age story and the outsider’s confessional tale. As with his previous novels, Hard Core Logo and American Whiskey Bar, the appeal of The Pornographer’s Poem lies in the immediacy with which it tackles the complex, gritty particulars of who we are. Devoid of sensationalism, flecked with a tart, satiric humour, The Pornographer’s Poem is a clear-eyed attempt at getting at the nuances of the human psyche.