[Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following review of Disclosure, she faults Crichton's facile manipulation of deep-seated anxieties about women and his poorly developed sexual harassment theme.]

Some years ago I had the misfortune to read a magazine essay by a writer and academic colleague in which he bravely charted his dogged struggle to see women as human beings. One measure of the psychic distance he had traveled was his ability to admit that he had once belonged to a college fraternity in which a ritual of initiation or bonding (I forget the exact purpose) required that a fraternity brother go out on the street, select a woman at random, and bite her on the buttocks.

One would need to have spent the last decade on another planet in order not to know how essential confession is for the "recovery process": indeed, it's often the first sign of recovery. But alas, too little attention is paid to the effect of our confessions on the unfortunate person or persons to whom we elect to confess. Surely I am not the only woman who, ever since reading that essay, has found it difficult to have a simple chat with the recovering biter and not notice that, on leaving the room, I am backing toward the door.

One of the pleasures of great fiction is that it frees us not only from the strictures of time, the narrow circumscriptions of our individual lives, but also from the limits imposed by biology. Reading Chekhov or William Trevor, we are at once old and young, male and female. Reading Anna Karenina, we're not only Anna and Vronsky, but Karenin, Levin, Dolly, even Frou-Frou, Vronsky's hapless horse. Under the spell of a first-rate writer, we become Raskolnikov, Humbert Humbert, Molloy, gleefully bashing landladies, chasing nymphets, sucking stones. Nothing human is foreign to us. It suddenly all makes sense.

Bad writing—particularly bad writing about sex—has quite the opposite effect. Perusing some of this season's new fiction, we may feel that sex is more of an insoluble mystery than we ever suspected, and that the limits and solipsisms of gender are steadily closing in on us like the advancing prison walls in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." We are not so much transported to some new height of understanding as left enmired on the front lines of gender war….

[The] hero of Michael Crichton's Disclosure imagines that he likes women—or at least doesn't realize how deeply they appall him. We recognize Tom Sanders as a good guy when, at the novel's beginning, he remarks that his wife looks beautiful even without her makeup and patiently endures a temper tantrum from his small daughter that would drive most members of the Nurturant Sex straight up the nearest wall. "We don't kick Daddy there," is how Tom fields a well-aimed little foot to the groin, a cautionary reminder that might have served him just as well during the long and humiliating day ahead of him at the office.

Tom's a rising star at Digicom, a high-tech computer communications company on the brink of a major corporate merger or takeover, or whatever. But the promotion Tom is expecting goes (thanks to a boss committed to affirmative action at its most criminally mediocratizing) to Meredith Johnson, who is not only a woman—but Tom's former girlfriend! And though Tom is adept at diagnosing the glitches in disk drives and production lines, he somehow fails to read the signals when Meredith invites him to an intimate after-hours meeting and orders out for white wine and condoms.

It's worth suppressing our fastidious shivers of distaste and accepting Crichton's invitation to be flies on the wall at this scene of seduction, rejection, and betrayal. For what happens is particularly revealing of what's really at issue here: not the legal and moral implications of turn-about sexual harassment (it's Tom whose job is at risk unless he accedes to Meredith's grabby advances) but a much more primitive, instinctive, and, as it were, knee-jerk misogyny. Despite Tom's reservations, he finds himself responding to Meredith's embraces until she makes a critical mistake: "And then she turned her head aside and coughed…. Something snapped in him. He sat back coldly."

Given Disclosure's long reign at the top of best-seller lists, sales of over-the-counter cough suppressants may skyrocket as women get the message that men are repulsed by their unwilled, unbidden, all-too-human reflexes. Later in the novel, Tom convinces his (female) lawyer that Meredith's cough was a sign of chilly, passionless distance and calculation ("But at the moment, right in the intense moment, I'm telling you—nobody coughs.") Lovers with pesky throat tickles may want to remember this and be warned, unless they are fortunate enough to have found partners who will love them and not despise them for inhabiting their cumbersome, unruly, reflex-ridden bodies.

As always, Crichton is a genius at the sort of meretricious fiction that seems to have been written with one hand on the computer and the other on the pulse of our basest and most unenlightened prejudices and fears. His earlier novels have skillfully exploited the popular distrust of scientists, of research, of technology, our xenophobic angst about competition from the Japanese. Disclosure digs even deeper, down to men's primal fear of women. To hear Tom Sanders and his pals complain, men really have a raw deal—and it's getting worse. "Sometimes women scare the hell out of me," says one of Tom's buddies, and several hundred pages later, Tom comes to the realization that we are living in a "climate where men were assumed to be guilty of anything they were accused of…. There were new rules now, and every man knew them."

Are there actually thousands of readers silently shaking their heads in agreement? Do they really imagine that the modern world is run by ruthless, powerful, castrating women who have somehow managed to bend the legal and political systems to do their vile bidding? Sadly, I'm reminded of the writing student who assured me that his violent pornographic novel would probably never see the light of day because of the international conspiracy of women controlling the publishing industry.