Harper’s Explores Incest In Fiction

What’s all the rage? Harper’s Katie Roiphe spends a considerable effort this month documenting the incidence of incest in contemporary fiction. With examples drawn from Jane Smiley, Russell Banks and others her observation is sharp, but her conclusions leave much lacking.

The frequency, she says, proves a trend, and the trend, she figures, is reason for the frequency. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and, in complementary fashion, she decides, of soul-baring weaklings searching for cheap thrills in the headlines.

The problems begin with closer examination of the texts. Could anyone say that Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” is “about” incest? I found it a moving reinterpretation of “King Lear,” and many of these books have equally disparate themes.

More disturbing still is that Roiphe ignores other reasons for a subject to recur, as if frequency automatically negates validity. Is she making light of sins against children, or of the blackout that barred such topics for so long? Writing about incest, she may as well be the film wag who in a recent Entertainment Weekly noted that the frequency of vomiting onscreen has risen.