Rating: 
Summary: Harrowing Loneliness
Review: I have read, and liked, Kathryn Harrison's beautiful books, Thicker Than Water and Poison, so when The Kiss was published, I was more than a little dismayed. Why, I asked myself, would a beautiful and talented writer like Harrison want to "cash in" with an exploitative piece of tripe like this? I really wasn't sure I even believed the events Harrison was writing about had even happened, but for now, I would give her the benefit of the doubt.Then a friend, knowing I was a fan of Harrison's, gave me a copy of The Kiss. It was too perverse to read, I thought, and I threw it in a closet. But, eventually, morbid curiosity got the best of me and I read the book. I was both shocked and pleased. Shocked at what the book portrayed, and pleased to find that Harrison wasn't "cashing in" on anything. The Kiss is a wonderful book, and, it is wonderfully written. It is spare, revealing, raw, dignified and one of the most harrowing evocations of loneliness I have ever encountered. Harrison was an only child whose father deserted his little family when Kathryn was only six months old. Her mother, who was severely depressed, spent her days in bed, a black satin mask shielding her from the outside world. Kathryn, as a tiny girl, would spend days at her sleeping mother's bedside, dropping shoes, slamming hairbrushes, peering inside the sleep mask, willing this unwilling mother to please wake up and love her. The mother didn't. At the age of six, Kathryn was sent to live with her Grandmother while her mother moved to a nearby apartment. Missing her mother, Kathryn would go to look at the dresses her mother had left behind. One day, folding herself into a beautiful sun-gold dress, this little girl summoned the courage to ask herself, "If a dress like this was not worth taking, how could I have hoped to be?" Far from being bitter over her husband's abandonment, Kathryn's mother remained romantically fixated on Kathryn's father. He visited when Kathryn was only five and she can remember her mother's intense interest in him and the way he would "arrange" them for his own family photographs. As a teenager, Kathryn became severely anorexic. She tells us it was a sign of rebellion against her mother's blatant sexuality. Her breasts disappeared, then her hips, then her periods. When her mother took her to a gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm, prior to going off to college, Kathryn endured one the most bizarre situations I have ever encountered, in "life" or in fiction. Suffice it to say, if you read this book, it will certainly shock you. When Kathryn was twenty, her father again visited. Although he was remarried and had children with his new wife, Kathryn was well aware that her own mother had been carrying on secret sexual encounters with this man. "She uses his curiosity about me, and mine about him," Harrison writes, "as the excuse to plan a reunion that will include her. If this is the case, how bitterly she will regret the ruse." Kathryn's father did visit and while he was there, he slept with Kathryn's mother. It was Kathryn, however, who drove him to the airport to catch his flight home. And it was there that her father first kissed her goodbye. But this was no ordinary kiss, at least not ordinary for a father and a daughter. "He touches his lips to mine," Harrison says. "I stiffen. My father pushed his tongue into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn." Yes, she was old enough to know better, and, in fact, she did know better. But life and the circumstances under which she had grown up, the needs that had still gone unmet--all of these and more converged at the moment of that kiss to propel Kathryn Harrison over the edge of reason and place her in her father's power. Never light-hearted and carefree, Kathryn quit college and fell into a deep depression, one she describes as a "cold, sinking torpor." She lived alone in a basement apartment, talking to her father on the telephone for hours each night as her persuaded her, isolated her and finally seduced her. He was, after all, all she had. Even the love letters he sent her, she later discovered, were replicas of ones he had sent her mother twenty years earlier. They slept together, father and daughter. "God gave you to me," was her father's explanation, as if this made things alright, as if this was all the explanation that was needed. Kathryn, depressed and impressionable couldn't see her father for what he really was--a selfish, self-centered narcissist who would use anyone and anything to further his own needs and wants. Readers who are looking for all the gory details won't find them in this book, for Kathryn remembers very little about having sex with her father save for the fact that it definitely was not good and it definitely made her feel more alone than she had ever felt before. To her credit, Kathryn's mother, suspecting the truth of what was happening, put aside her own vanity long enough to take Kathryn to a psychiatrist. There, the young Kathryn put on the performance of a lifetime and robbed her mother, not only of her father, but of the only human being in whom her mother could confide. The worst, though, was yet to come, and it would be a long time before Harrison could free herself and write The Kiss. The Kiss is not the first book to chronicle adult incest nor is it the most famous to do so. Anaïs Nin reportedly slept with her own father, but Nin was a notoriously unreliable writer, albeit a very good one. It doesn't help, either, that we really have no signposts in the world of incest literature. Many of us find dinner with our mother and father an excruciating experience; almost no grown man or woman wants to sleep with a parent. Wisely, Harrison offers no excuses for her behavior as she knews there are none. She knows it was wrong and she knows it was ludicrous. But human behavior is usually inexplicable, the good, the bad, the mundane and yes, the ludicrous. Harrison has let the facts stand or fall as they may; her usual lyric prose is pared-down and she resists any temptation to go over the top. The result is that The Kiss is a harrowing account of loneliness and deprivation, the worst nightmare any child could ever imagine. One of the keys to Harrison's own healing is to be found in the book's dedication to "Beloved 1942-1985." "Beloved" is Kathryn's mother, now deceased. After years of roiling over her mother's faults and the wrong that was done to her, Kathryn Harrison finally found peace and reconciliation. She became "beloved" to her mother and her mother became "beloved" to her. This is a painful and painfully honest book, harrowing, sad and lonely. But, ultimately, it is the chronicle of one woman's courageous triumph, a triumph that can be appreciated by any other woman, abuse survivor or not. For is there any daughter among us who cannot say, with all honesty, "If things had only been a little different, it could have been me?"
Rating: 
Summary: Not deserving of the derision it engendered from some
Review: This is a beautifully written and constructed memoir, a work of art, not a work of calculated exploitation. Its use of present tense, flashbacks-and-forwards, and description are cinematic-- has anyone written a screenplay of this book? Someone should. Those reviewers who criticize Harrison for a lack of dimensionality in the characterizations of her parents and grandparents should remember that this is not a novel, however novelistic it seems. This voice is not omniscient; in fact, for much of the years described she is a sleepwalker in a nightmare, and a child at that. The book is very successful at capturing the essence of this experience from its author's tortured point of view.
Rating:
Summary: An astonishingly well written book
Review: While this book could have been shocking and impossible to read, Harrison writes it so beautifully that the reader is quickly drawn in. I read this in one night,and couldn't put the book down. Harrison does not waste one single word. Rather than frightening her reader, Harrison convinces us that what happened to her is the most natural,though not the most normal, of experiences, as traumatic as it was. It is nearly impossible to describe how beautifully Harrison has written about what could be a shocking and artless book. A psychiatrist I once knew was convinced that all women want to sleep with their fathers. Well, that was in the mid-60's, and that Freudian thought is old-hat now. But Harrison draws her reader into the dreamlike state she found herself in with great skill. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Outside Looking In
Review: It will prove interesting to see reviewers attempt to bend the content of *The Kiss* into some kind of recognizable, hence manageable, shape. Once catalogued as gothic, grotesque, pornographic or romantic, as brave or cowardly, an exploitation or an exploration, a descent into evil or an emergence from hell, *The Kiss* would become a manageable text and the reader could find a way to experience second hand this disturbing memoir of father-daughter incest. *The Kiss*, however, refuses to take a nice tidy shape for the reader's convenience. The clergyman father who later takes up the breeding of pit bulls belongs to Faulkner, the Jewish grandparents who raise the author tumble into the book from another planet, the mother who remains a cipher resists our every reading. Indeed, the entire book refuses, at all costs, to let us in -- no surprise, given the betrayal at its center. But there's something unsatisfying about this rejection of the poor languishing reader. In the end, this reader felt left just plain too far outside the circle of finely crafted prose.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazingly cynical
Review: Here's a wrtier. She's been to the Iowa Writers Workshop. She's married to the deputy editor of Harper's, the last bastion of upper west side smarmy NIMBY liberalism in the U.S. She's written some critically acclaimed novels, but sales are not as they should be (or her or publisher or hubby would like). What to do? Well, I would recycle the plot of my FIRST novel, style it as a confession a la Oprah and -- well, as one reviewer said, ka-ching! Brilliant, but nauseatingly cynical. Her New Yorker writer style, with its charming little images and two-bit solipism, might appeal to teens who like Nine Inch Nails, but this is not linerature for adults. It's a swinish attempt to cash in on the faux-confessional trend that dominated American letters in the late 90s, and succeeded magnificently. Colin and Kathryn Harrison are the Borgias of American fiction. As Lee said of Pope, "[They] should be suppressed."
Rating:
Summary: One long, flowing drink of water
Review: Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss" reads like one long drink of water, fluid, clear, easy on the mind and the body. What I loved most about this book was the honesty with which is was written. Sure, some can argue that the flowery prose and poetic quality of the story obscured honesty, though I argue that this is precisely what gave birth to it. It's hard enough to write about such a sensitive topic without making it seem less gritty than it really is. Harrison should be praised for the pinache and integrity she pulled this tale off with. I've moved on to her other books because of "The Kiss". I suggest others do the same! Congratulations, Kathryn.
Rating:
Summary: Deeply Moving
Review: "The Kiss" by Kathryn Harrison is an amazingly powerful and intense book. The subject matter of incest is difficult to take, but it's done so honestly and with such poignancy that it allows the reader to be interested without judgement. Like other reviewers have said, I also saw similarities to "Lolita" but, this seems to hold a different tone on many levels. It's clear this book is not for everyone and it takes a certain sense of maturity to understand and appreciate it, but aside from the dramatic storyline, it's a wonderful novel.
Rating:
Summary: Touching and thought provoking!
Review: I had read Lolita shortly before I picked up "The Kiss." When I realized what the story was moving toward, I wasn't sure if I was ready to deal with the subject of incest and manipulation for another 200+ pages. Surprisingly, the book was not at all what I had imagined. It was truly touching and thought provoking. I completely understood the state that caused the events to unfold as they did. Harrison's descriptions are so vivid, helping the reader relate to the narrator's need for affection and acceptance. "The Kiss" is certainly worth the small amount of time it will take to read.
Rating:
Summary: A Worthy Journey
Review: Devastating. What better word to describe such a story as the one Kathryn Harrison relates, the story of a father who exploits his daughter's natural longing for him in order to satisfy his very unnatural appetite for utter dominion over her--her body, her mind, and most damagingly, her soul. Harrison's prose is raw and sparse and brutally effective. Her words cut into your heart with surgical precision and allow you to bleed along with her, to feel the numbing aftermath of pain redoubled upon pain, of dried out tears in cold, empty motel rooms. But just as the journey that Harrison takes us through is difficult and heartbreaking, so the ultimate rewards of her self-realization and freedom are like ice water for a baked and cracking soul. Surely, it is a journey well worth the tears fallen.
Rating:
Summary: Emotional, but hard to follow at times.
Review: This was a powerful emotional journey, albeit disturbing. Harrison's ability to explain, with detail, the state of her psyche in relation to her experience with not only her father, but her cold-hearted MOTHER, is amazing. But, at times, I could not follow her train of thought and the story itself: its prose weak at several key moments. Overall, she writes with unfathomable passion, but perhaps this passion does not give way to total clarity.
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