DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997                TAG: 9703310216

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER 

                                            LENGTH:   75 lines

HARRISON'S ``KISS'' IS MORE THAN JUST A KISS

THE KISS

A Memoir

KATHRYN HARRISON

Random House. 207 pp. $20.

The book's cover shows a photograph of an adult male and a girl of about 12. The faces have been cropped off, so the identities remain secret. All that one can see are the suggestive words of the title, The Kiss.

Yet Kathryn Harrison's controversial, new memoir, The Kiss, is not really about a kiss, although an intimate kiss does occur between father and daughter. Nor is the memoir really about the sexual intimacies shared by father and daughter, although those intimacies do occur. And have been exploited in the press.

Rather the memoir is about a daughter's need for love from a mother who is absent - sometimes physically and always spiritually. It's also about what happens to a daughter's soul when her mother rejects her.

Harrison, author of Thicker Than Water and Poison, has dealt with the theme of incest in fiction. This memoir is an attempt to deal with incest in fact.

Despite reviews suggesting the contrary, The Kiss reads like a combination of psychology and poetry and nothing like pornography. Nonetheless, the publisher has sought to capitalize on the allure of incest and has thus minimized Harrison's story.

The jacket blurbs, by novelists Mary Gordon, Tobias Wolff and Mary Karr, suggest this is a lurid book. Karr speaks of ``Harrison's raw, clear voice'' telling the story of a ``father who seduces a beautiful daughter. . . . ''

But The Kiss is anything but lurid. Psychiatrist and author Robert Coles - quoted on the book's inside flap - makes the real point: ``What the book finally offers is an account of a moral victory. . . ''

The price Harrison paid for that victory is recounted sensitively on every page. The book covers approximately 20 years, beginning when the author is 4. The story focuses on the triangle of mother, father and child.

Mother and father meet when both are 17. Shortly thereafter, they conceive a child, marry and divorce, pressured by the maternal grandparents, who consider the father socially inferior.

Harrison knows her father only by his absence: His name and existence are not acknowledged; even his picture is excised from family photographs. Her mother is also absent. She leaves Kathryn with her parents to raise.

On a few occasions, the father writes to his daughter. She meets him three times, none particularly memorable. The relationship between mother and daughter, however, is memorable: ``As I stand watching her sleep,'' Harrison writes, ``I feel the world open behind me like a chasm. I know I can't step even an inch back from her bed without plummeting.''

Harrison's father initiates sexual intimacy between them when she is living at college. At first, Harrison refuses him. Then she realizes he wants all or nothing: total control of her or nothing to do with her. And she accedes to his demands.

Why? Harrison suggests that she was motivated by a desperate need for parental love. In addition, her father was a very persuasive man. She was unable to resist the headiness of such advances. She also wanted to pay back her mother for her absence. Here the book is heavy with psychological musings.

The sexual details are handled with restraint. Harrison ends the relationship with her father when her mother dies. In effect, death frees her from his control.

As an aspect of that freedom, she writes this memoir. By writing, she hopes to understand her life, to immortalize her mother and to express remorse over how gravely she wronged her. Ultimately, Harrison hopes, ``a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right.''

This book contains no such sentences; no book can contain them. Yet the very writing of this memoir begins to undo much that was wrong in Harrison's life. One can only hope that the future will bring her the forgiveness she seeks. MEMO: Diane Scharper teaches memoir writing at Towson State University

in Maryland.

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