[In the following excerpt, Goudie argues that narratives of childhood sexual abuse—such as Exposure—have social significance even when they do not succeed artistically.]

I mentioned to a colleague that I was reviewing two novels revolving around the sexual abuse of children. “Novels?” he responded, with surprise. To render this social issue in fiction would seem the ultimate challenge; Susan Palwick's first novel, Flying in Place and Kathryn Harrison's second, Exposure both illustrate its difficulty. Both suffer from being too driven by plot and pat psychology: reading the novels in tandem leaves one with the leaden sense that life is only too knowable—that it has all the mystery of a social services pamphlet.

Still, I feel uncomfortable when I criticize these two books, the first earnest but clumsy, the second a bit slick: both overexplained. I recall how I felt when I taught college composition and received themes on incest or rape in response to requests for personal narratives. In the face of such material, discussion of comma splices seemed trite, the assignment of a grade tactless. But if Flying in Place and Exposure do not quite succeed as art, they serve as evidence that women are writing and speaking of what was previously unspeakable. And that's important. …

Kathryn Harrison's Exposure is about a different kind of sexual abuse: voyeurism. Photographer Edgar Rogers has made his artistic reputation with pictures of his daughter Ann that stirred debate about whether art should know or respect boundaries of privacy. As the novel opens, Ann, 33, has become a videographer, creating tidy films of weddings and christenings out of messy real-life material. As a major museum retrospective of her father's work approaches, Ann has fallen back onto an old addiction, crystal meth—or speed—and an old compulsion, shoplifting.

The passages describing Ann's substance abuse and her stealing are convincing and gripping. The shoplifting sequences in designer corners of major department stores ring with authoritative detail, from the padlocks at the end of the plastic-sheathed cables that hold these expensive garments to the “imported tungsten shears” Ann uses to liberate the objects of her desire.

The texture of these sections, however, is overwhelmed by Harrison's heavy-handed treatment of the root of Ann's criminal behavior. Ann's beautiful mother died in their kitchen giving birth to her; Ann's father never transcends his grief. A photographer on a small West Texas newspaper, he is vaulted into fame and prestige with a chance photo of his five-year-old daughter asleep under some football bleachers, looking almost dead, or like a discarded piece of trash. The rest of Ann's childhood is squandered as her father's photographic model, always gaunt and lifeless. He poses her, mostly nude, until her developing breasts put a halt to her use as a model. As he coldly writes to his dealer: “Puberty meant that Ann lost what she had and became frankly rather than implicitly sexual, which is not interesting, and so I cannot take any more good pictures.”

As the retrospective nears, various feminist activist groups stage demonstrations at the art museum, in particular one group Harrison unfortunately names “‘Crusaders for a United Terrorist Sisterhood,’ or, more informally, CUNTS.” It is jarring when feminists make cameo appearances as objects of satirical derision in a novel that deals with an issue feminists have worked hard to bring to light. A young woman wearing only underpants and a T-shirt bearing Ann's name even sets her hair on fire to protest the upcoming exhibit. The pressure of this public outcry—feminists expressing for Ann what she can't express for herself—intensifies her self-destructive bingeing. A diabetic careless about her health, she becomes more reckless with her diet, her insulin injections and her substance abuse.

Exposure sags beneath too much explanation, which, in the end, amounts to fiction by mathematical or psychological formula. Harrison even includes a full psychological profile of Ann made by a psychiatrist, following a showy attempted theft of a big diamond ring from Tiffany's.

At novel's close, Ann is hospitalized, but her doctors allow her to continue the weekly volunteer work she's done for years—holding abandoned babies in the pediatric ward of Bellevue. The connection between this particular volunteer and the neglected babies is only too apparent.

As I read these novels I kept thinking that neither author had enough emotional distance from her material to produce the nuance of rich fiction. Perhaps as a culture we are not yet ready to make art out of such painful, newly exposed subject matter. On the other hand, maybe the sexual exploitation of children can never be transformed into art. For the power of fiction derives from its allusiveness and mystery, its ability to suggest what's unknowable; whereas the impulse when handling such disturbing material is to search for, and even labor, a definitive explanation.