[In the following excerpt, Udovitch asserts that Kathryn Harrison brings to The Kiss "a mannered, accomplished technique, which … is executed with precision and grace. What she fails to bring is any sense of rigorous engagement with her material."]

Okay, let it first be said that if Kathryn Harrison, whose memoir The Kiss tells the story of the incestuous relationship she had with her father between the ages of 20 and 24, wants to make this experience the centerpiece of her published work, be it fictional, nonfictional, pictographic, or a series of rhyming billboards on the Garden State Parkway, the emotional, moral, and financial implications of this decision are nobody's business but hers. She has in fact told virtually the same story in fictional form with her debut novel, the pleasantly readable Thicker Than Water, as well as a variation on the theme in her second, the abrasively unreadable Exposure. (In her third book, a historical novel called Poison, the narrator sleeps with a priest, a father of a different kind.)

But mine is a minority opinion, if the several prominent prepublication dissections of the author's possible motives for writing this book are any indication of consensus. There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the impact The Kiss might have on Harrison's children and while no one has gone so far as to suggest outright that Harrison had sex with her father in her twenties in order to advance her career at a later date, this was definitely the subtext of at least one editorial on the subject. That the publications in which these chastisements appeared themselves routinely tell stories as scandalous as Harrison's raises a very nineties question: Who controls the narrative? Well, Oprah. Let's move on.

So, The Kiss is a book that seems destined to be received mostly for its extraliterary entertainment value, perhaps because it is a rather pallid piece of work. Harrison is the child of teenage parents who separated in her infancy. She was raised primarily by her maternal grandparents and had just enough involvement with her negligent, seductive mother to establish a longing for more that must have amounted to a permanent low-boil torture. Although she saw her father on two or three occasions in childhood, they were more or less estranged until the author was 20, when the titular kiss, involving tongue, occurred.

The period of sexual involvement that followed was in many ways typical of father-daughter incest, with the emotional coercion made possible, despite Harrison's nominally having reached an age of independence, by the profundity of her parentless neediness. (And, I think it fair to say—since the sex ended with the death of her mother, who suspected the affair—by the extremity of her anger at her other parent.)

This is obviously an awful story in life; but in art, even gothic and dreadful pain is only as interesting as what the artist brings to it. Harrison brings a mannered, accomplished technique, which, though not my cup of tea, is executed with precision and grace. What she fails to bring is any sense of rigorous engagement with her material.

This is partly because of the remote, almost somnambulant tone I imagine she's intentionally employing to convey her then-state of mind. But The Kiss is also padded with questions that are not really questions, anecdotes that are burnished to a little too high a literary gloss to retain their human complexity, and artful, thoughtless writing. "I'm always trudging after him over expanses of stained carpet and dull linoleum" goes one typically ominous example. "The walls around us warn of illegal transport. Arrows point to baggage claims and taxi stands. Everywhere there are small blue signs bearing international symbols for food, first aid, toilets." This is an awful lot of breath to waste unless your subject is the trauma to which you were subjected in your youth by an airport. Harrison has said that this book came out quickly because she'd been writing it in her head for years, and that's finally how it reads. It has all the facility, in both its positive and negative connotations, of (to cop a line from Joan Didion) a story you tell yourself in order to live.