SOURCE: "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 11, 1997, p. 8.

[In the following positive review, Linfield praises Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss and rebuts the negative appraisals of several other critics.]

Every now and then a book comes along that disturbs, disrupts and polarizes the public in new ways. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was such a book, as was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve. (This used to happen with films, too—Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, Shoah—but that, alas, seems to be a thing of the past.) In such cases, it is not just the work itself but the author too—and, in particular, his motives, integrity and moral vision—that are scrutinized and interrogated. The debates over such books can turn highly unpleasant, yet...