n Our Father, French combines an overall condemnation of patriarchy with a close-up examination of one of its noxious fruits. The four women who gather at Stephen Upton's sickbed share more than the bond of biological sisterhood. Halfway through the novel, they reveal to each other and to the reader that each, in turn, has been sexually molested by their father.

Father-daughter incest has come out of secret recesses and into the spotlight of popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s. It is one of those darkly titillating topics that make instant fodder for talk shows, self-help gurus, and novelists in search of plots. Yet its treatment here is very different from that of most other contemporary novels, which have tended to present incest and other sexual abuse of children as a tragic but individual aberration.

In French's view it is the logical and frequent result...