TABOO TIME

By Martha Duffy

It might be better if this woeful memoir had been a novel; its tone of hysterical self-obsession might pass as fiction. But Kathryn Harrison has already drawn on the theme of adult incest in her 1991 novel, Thicker than Water, to no great reverberance, so in The Kiss (Random House; 207 pages; $20) she tries the currently fashionable route of confession. Hers: an affair with her father.

Harrison's preacher father was kicked out of the house by her mother and grandparents when she was tiny, and she had almost no contact with him until she was 20. The household was grim. Grandmother would scream like a "scalded infant"; mother, who lived elsewhere most of the time, beat her daughter with a hairbrush. The child herself was unlikable. There is an unintentionally risible passage where she pries open the eyes of newborn kittens. The teenage years are marked by anorexia ("the dizzy rapture of starving") and bulimia ("I never taste what I eat. Sometimes I don't even know what it is until I throw it up.").

In short, she is a disaster waiting to happen when her father re-enters her life, and they become mutually obsessed. The actual affair does not begin until a gloomy courtship by letter, tape and phone call has worn thin. The carnal phase is really an epilogue. Soon the father has shed religion in favor of breeding attack dogs, and the daughter has decamped for New York City to write "a post-modern novel." One hesitates to question the veracity of a book labeled a memoir, but Harrison's overheated prose and her sketchy characters and settings make this more a purple tale than a glimpse of truth.

--By Martha Duffy