Books: 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...

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