As Daddy begins his come-on, 'His hot eyes consume me.' Those words were written, mind you, not by Danielle Steel or Judith Krantz but by the reigning darling of the New York literati. She may be a well of self-pity, but Harrison is a world champ when it comes to self-adoration. 'I grow afraid of the dark.' 'I wake screaming.' 'I am, as I have been from my birth, the inevitable compromise of my parents' privacy.' 'My days are as long as despair can make them.' 'Her eyes, when they turn at last toward me, are like two empty mirrors. Its essential elements are not graphic sex - in that department Harrison is coy rather than revealing - but a revolting mixture of self-pity and narcissism.

The story, such as it is, begins with the divorce of Harrison's parents when she was a baby, continues through a childhood spent largely in the custody of her maternal grandparents along with irregular connections with her indifferent mother, then climaxes - sorry, no other word will do - with the reappearance of her father and his seduction of the not-unwilling her. Instead it is chockablock with romance-novel cliches and mannered, heavy-breathing minimalism. If 'The Kiss' were indeed art, perhaps we could find a way to forgive its offenses against familial privacy and ordinary decency, but there is not an artful word in it. Harrison and her apologists want us to believe that from dark personal experience she has produced a work of art notable for its 'bravery,' a book that is 'ironic and compassionate,' 'thoughtful, disciplined,' 'uncanny, heartbreaking.' Those are some of the words used by Tobias Wolfe, Mary Karr, Robert Coles and Mary Gordon, all of whom have supplied smarmy blurbs for this book and all of whom as a consequence should be sentenced to perdition eternal. The juicier the confession the hotter the sales, so the orthodoxy of the hour has it, and Kathryn Harrison means to out-juice everyone. The publication of 'The Kiss' has nothing to do with shielding the young and everything to do with exploiting the current infatuation with confessional memoirs. That this is self-serving hogwash needs no elaboration. Just get this out now, cash in on it today, and the poor innocent children will never know anything of it. The answer, given in a Q&A supplied to reviewers by her publisher, is revealing: 'There was an internal imperative to deal with the subject now, and that need was confirmed by my husband Colin's and my desire that it be published as soon as possible - before our children were any older and more aware of the media around them.'įrom this one must deduce that Harrison fancies books to be mere e-mail, gossamer things that, once read, vanish into cyberspace, never to be heard from again. You may wonder, since Harrison has already published three novels of transparently autobiographical import, why she chose this time around to tell her story as nonfiction.

It is the 'memoir,' as surely you do not need to be told, of Kathryn Harrison, who claims to have had a sexual relationship with her father and who has made that the central element - the piece de resistance, if you will - of this book. 'The Kiss' is trash from first word to last, self-promotion masquerading as literature. It is the Flavor of the Month, so those of us in the boondocks are expected to belly up and smile. The chattering classes of Manhattan and the Hamptons have homed in on it with the unerring instinct of swine slopping in swill. It is a measure of the times that this book - slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical - is enjoying the rapt attention of the gods of publicity. THE KISS A Memoir By Kathryn Harrison Random House.

Kathryn harrison the kiss