Sign in  |  Register

The New Criterion

It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism
- The Wall Street Journal
Subscribe Now and get unlimited access

Nonfiction Chronicle

May 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 purchase

Subscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions)

Subscribe to TNC (Online only)

Purchase article credit and clip this article

If you already have an account login first

Brooke Allen's latest book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Ivan R Dee). 


more from this author

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


The New Criterion

By the author

The end of the line

by Brooke Allen

On Exit the King, Happiness, Our Town & God of Carnage.

An entrance & an exit

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.

Most popular

view more >

download
first delivery

The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices

New from The New Criterion:
40 page special issue
on our conference

"Free speech in
an age of Jihad"

Events

November 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
"The Criminalization of Making Money" by Lionel Shriver, Recorded 9/25/09


New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 3
"The State and the Threat to Democracy" by Jeremy Black and "The Paradox of the Intellectual and the Future of Capitalism" by Tim Congdon, Recorded on 9/25/2009


New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 2
"Nice 'N' Easy: The Age of Micro Tyranny" by Mark Steyn, Recorded on 9/25/2009

Weblog