In just a few years, a ghastly trauma of childhood has been turned into an all-purpose literary ingredient, the Cool Whip of serious fiction. Editors and agents who track new fiction are encountering incest everywhere they look. “I cannot deal with it anymore,” says a magazine book-review editor. “I’m not shocked by it, I’m bored, It’s not a riveting plot device. There’s something opportunistic about it.”
The heroine of Dani Shapiro’s 1990 “Playing with Fire” falls in love with her college roommate’s stepfather, Ben, who has been sleeping with the roommate; Ben takes up with the heroine as well. In Kathryn Harrison’s 1991 “Thicker Than Water” the narrator gets together with her long-lost father when she’s a teenager and has a miserable affair with him. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn’s new novel, “Break the Heart of Me,” features a heroine who remembers being sexually abused by her grandfather. Male authors too are weighing in: Stephen King included a sexual-abuse victim (female) in “Gerald’s Game,” and Robert Olen Butler does the same in his new “They Whisper.” “It’s all part of the culture of victimization we’re in now,” says Ann Patty, editor at large at Crown. “Somebody wants to jazz something up, they throw in a little incest. But the meaning of the word is being degraded. I actually heard someone use the expression, ‘I was emotionally incested’.”
As a literary theme, incest goes back a long way; but most of the novelists drawn to it these days aren’t thinking Oedipus, they’re thinking Oprah. Of course, not every incest story is a cliche plucked from daytime TV. “In the hands of a real writer, this is fabulous stuff,” says literary agent Amanda Urban. Jane Smiley’s 1991 ‘A Thousand Acres" beautifully reimagines the story of King Lear, placing it on an Iowa farm and seeing the senile old father from the point of view of his daughters, whom he has raped. One of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s recent “The Robber Bride” is a woman abused by her uncle in childhood; Atwood makes the horror fresh and relevant.
But for too many writers, incest is a trap. To see French tumble into it is especially disappointing, at least for fans of her 1977 stunner, “The Women’s Room,” which took then new feminist issues and stirred them into a wonderfully rousing fictional polemic, perfect for its moment. “Our Father” isn’t fiery, it’s formulaic, as if French had a checklist of current preoccupations listed on half of her computer screen and dutifully crossed them off while she composed the novel on the other half.
Elizabeth, for instance, is a big success in Washington politics, but it’s because she thinks like Margaret Thatcher. No happiness for cold, lonely Elizabeth, not until she begins to understand the nature of patriarchal oppression. Mary, who sought success by marrying money several times, always unhappily, says outright that she doesn’t believe in feminism because women need men. By the end of the novel she knows better, thanks to reading feminist poetry. Alex is the spiritual one, married to a Jewish man but entranced by self-sacrificing nuns. She’d like to open a clinic in El Salvador and bursts into tears of joy when she reads the jacket copy on her Christmas present: “A biography of Edith Stein, the only Jewish Catholic to become a saint’.” As for Ronnie, whose mother was the Mexican housekeeper–Ronnie is the hope of the future. She’s poor, brown, a lesbian and cares about the environment. In company like this, incest never gets a chance to make an authentic impact. It’s just another plague.
But the incest onslaught may be about to peak, at least in fiction. (“It’s much worse in nonfiction,” says Pamela Dorman, executive editor at Viking. “We’re drowning in Satanism and repressed memories.”) Marge Piercy, the prolific author whose novels always arrive like dispatches from the exact center of the Zeitgeist, has a fine new book coming out in March called “The Longings of Women.” One of the three main characters is Leila, a college professor who’s an expert on battered women. At the start of the novel, Leila is all set to begin a new research project. Her most recent one is behind her–the writing is finished, the editing is complete, the manuscript is in press, it’s over. The subject? Incest survivors. And no, she isn’t one.
