Southern Exposure

CANDY by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. 224 pages. Putnam. $5.

Since pornography is now available at every neighborhood bookshop and drugstore, the idea of satirizing the pornographic novel was bound to occur to someone. If done with Swiftian skill, it could be defended on moral as well as literary grounds, even though it could easily descend to the level of a vice crusader's wet-lipped discourse on the evils of vice.

Candy is as far from Swift as a French postcard is from Hogarth. Its heroine, Candy Christian, is that supposedly fictitious character--the girl who was ruined by a book. A glad-glanded college girl, she believes everything she reads or is told, and thus her pretty head is filled with every cliche in the current liberal establishment of ideas. Unhappily there is just one thing she can do for her country, for colonial freedom, for Zen enlightenment, for Freud, for minorities, and this she certainly does. For example, she takes the most improbable of her lovers, a cretin with a "radish-white" humped back, because he is so loathsome that he constitutes a superminority of one.

It is true that Candy, Mephesto the mad professor, Irving Krankheit the mad psychiatrist (author of Masturbation Now!), a mad Buddhist monk, and several other off-white slaverers at whom she throws herself, have as much fun as a barrel of impure-minded monkeys. But the result is not uproarious enough to require comparison to Byron (as one critic has suggested), unless you have something against Byron.

Candy, originally written for Paris' Olympia Press, which specializes in sheer lubricity, is not pornography. It may even be described as antisexual; all too often, at the crucial moment, everything goes askew, and Candy slips back into her filmy panties, crying "Good grief!" Its most conspicuous intent is to be more outrageous in detail than what it is satirizing, and these days, that is hard to do. In the effort, Candy ends up dirty as hell.

No reviewer has said so. It seems that there is hardly a literary critic on earth today who would risk seeming a prude in print.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.