The New Criterion
It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism
- The Wall Street Journal
Nonfiction ChronicleMay 1997 Devouring love by Brooke Allen On The Kiss by Kathyrn Harrison, The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon & The Architect of Desire by Suzannah Lessard Just what does it say about the New York literati that the book that has made the single biggest splash this season is a thin, poorly written volume, chockablock with bathos and cheap melodrama, dealing with the author’s incestuous affair with her father? Magazine editors and media pundits have fallen over one another in their rush to book Kathryn Harrison and either tout or fulminate against her new memoir, The Kiss.[1] A single issue of The New York Observer contained three pieces on it, including a parody; the ever-topical New Yorker made a bid to publish an excerpt in its pages. (New Yorker readers were deprived of this treat when Random House pushed The Kiss’s publication inconveniently forward.) Kathryn Harrison and her husband, Colin, a writer and editor, have eagerly encouraged the feeding frenzy, Kathryn by giving s ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 May 1997, on page 64 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/devouringlove-allen-3339
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
by Brooke Allen On Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre, The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, 33 Variations at Eugene O'Neill Theater, and the closing of Forbidden Broadway.  The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices 
New from The New Criterion: "Free speech in
EventsNovember 24 2009 OPEN EVENT: Laura Jacobs reading December 02 2009 Friends Event: The Swallow Anthology Reading December 17 2009 Friends Event: New Criterion Holiday Party Webcasts
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 4
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 3
New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 2 Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}