[In the following review of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Kaufman notes that "the reader wants, needs, what feels spontaneous; the reader gets something studied, carefully literary." She compares The Kiss to Harrison's other works and finds them similar, concluding that "perhaps The Kiss will serve as the means by which Harrison can finally exorcise her demons and begin to broaden the terrain of her fiction."]

There are lots of really swell ways for authors to market their works these days: Concoct an elaborately clumsy piece of fiction but swear on a stack of Publishers Weeklys that it's non-fiction (check out Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra). Slap between covers what is essentially non-fiction, call it fiction and credit it to Anonymous (Joe Klein's Primary Colors). Give potential customers something extra for their money by outfitting the book with a CD—it's got a good beat and you can read to it (a la Joyce Maynard and Laura Esquivel)! Or (with, perhaps, a certain amount of cynicism) put forward a memoir that traffics in the salacious and/or sensational, and become the subject of magazine and TV feature stories, in the manner of critically acclaimed novelist Kathryn Harrison.

The Kiss chronicles the affair, 16 years ago, between Harrison, then a college student, and her minister father. The product of a perfervid romance between two 17-year-olds who married in shotgun-wedding haste and divorced with dispatch, Harrison was raised mostly by her grandparents, Mom having decamped to live her own life, Dad, whom Harrison saw only twice during her childhood, having been summarily forced out of the picture. "It was in the garden … that my grandfather told my father that it was over between him and my mother…. My grandparents thought they could end it, erase my mother's unfortunate mistake. There was the baby, of course, the life that sprang from my mother's rebellion … there was me to consider, but I was a cost they'd accept. He, however, had to go."

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Harrison had a troubled childhood and adolescence—nightmares, anorexia, bulimia. It was a landscape bordered by her narcissistic grandmother, her self-centered, withholding mother, a sometimes-endearing grandfather who became increasingly uncomfortable with Kathryn as she passed through puberty, and by her shadowy, letter-writing father. When she sees him at 20 for the first time in 10 years, "my once-bobbed hair long, and my flat chest filled out, my father's eyes are fixed on me; he tears his gaze away with reluctance. This kind of besotted focus is intoxicating, especially for a girl schooled in self-effacement and taught that virtue believes more in its ugliness than in its beauty…. I don't know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it: my father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being."

He has bloodshot eyes, he's overweight, he sleeps with Harrison's mother the first time all three of them are together (despite the fact that he is remarried with children), then, talks about it in most ungallant terms with Harrison. "'I didn't do it because I wanted to,' he says. Humiliated on be-half of my mother, and shocked that he would betray her this way, I look not at him but at my plate."

That indiscretion doesn't begin to prepare Harrison for the indiscretion at the airport as her father prepares to return to his other family. He "pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent…. In years to come, I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It's the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed."

What draws the two of them together in this unholy alliance is "her," Harrison's distant mother, her father's elusive former wife; they are united in their love for a woman who can't, won't love them back. The affair, which is preceded by countless fulminations by Harrison's father that "God gave you to me," is played out at scenic points of interest and truck-stop motels across the Southwest, and it ends only with the death of Harrison's mother due to bone cancer.

Unfortunately, The Kiss, which reads rather like a fever dream, doesn't probe as deeply or as far as Father's tongue. While the story is set forth in the present tense, accruing to it an unsettling immediacy, Harrison has (understandably) so distanced herself from the events she recounts that the book's impact is greatly blunted. The reader wants, needs, what feels spontaneous; the reader gets something studied, carefully literary.

More problematic, The Kiss is told as though through a scrim; innuendo rather than specifics is the coin of the realm here. In so saying one feels like a greedy voyeur (of course, one feels like a voyeur by the very act of opening the book), but the fact is, if you're going to commit to telling the story Harrison has chosen to tell, either tell it and tell it in detail or don't publish it.

What this memoir confronts as fact has utterly informed Harrison's three novels. Thicker Than Water, which at the time the author insisted was purely a product of her imagination, covers precisely the same ground as The Kiss, if in more textured, graphic fashion. The potent Exposure deals with a woman haunted and almost undone by the erotic pictures taken of her in childhood by her celebrated photographer father. Poison is about a woman who has an affair with a priest (a different sort of father). Perhaps The Kiss will serve as the means by which Harrison can finally exorcise her demons and begin to broaden the terrain of her fiction. If so, it will have been worth it for the reader, certainly for Harrison.