Striptease In a Taxi

By John Skow

TITLE: EXPOSURE

AUTHOR: KATHRYN HARRISON

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 218 PAGES; $20

THE BOTTOM LINE: The reader becomes a voyeur, unable to stop watching as veils and bandages fall.

A beautiful young woman squirms on the rear seat of a taxi in midtown Manhattan, trying to get out of her tight skirt, and then, when she has managed to do that, squirms again, trying to wiggle into a second, somewhat tighter skirt. She succeeds, but the new skirt leaves no room for lingerie. Off come half-slip and panties. She leaves them on the taxi floor, with the old skirt. At her destination, as she pays the cabby, he nods at the new skirt. "Whatdja do, steal it?"

"Yes," she says.

Ann Rogers is cracking up, and not all that slowly. She is married to a bright, fairly sympathetic fellow who restores houses, and she is a successful partner in a business that makes videos of weddings. Makes, in fact, seamlessly joyous videos of weddings often awkward and sour, which is an art, and one she is good at. But her hobbies, shoplifting clothes from Bergdorf and ingesting methamphetamine, which she does quite often from the tip of her jackknife blade, don't foretell a long and happy life. She is a diabetic, in addition, and her meth addiction worsens a deteriorating eye condition whose far end is blindness.

So the plot is dreary and predictable in its basics: neurasthenic young woman falls apart. That is, in fact, what happens; Ann Rogers crumbles and collapses. Why does this matter? Why does author Harrison's novel (her second, after the much praised Thicker Than Water) grab the reader by the throat? Is it the hook of that voyeuristic first scene in the taxi? Are we waiting for something like that striptease to happen again?

Sure, partly. This is a commercial novel, and if you have to bludgeon readers to get their attention, well, that's show biz. But the author has more to tell. A succession of interleaved flashbacks gives a strange family history, seen through a camera's cold eye. Through happenstance, her grandfather, an American migrant to Mexico, became a photographer in the early days of the art and specialized in elaborate portraits of dead children in confirmation finery. A meningitis plague brought him prosperity. He was a journeyman, but his son, her father, became a famed photographic artist, whose morbid specialty was a long series of nude photographs of Ann, before puberty, arranged as if dead. As the adult Ann spirals out of control, a big retrospective show of her father's work is set to open.

In quick summary, this is melodrama. As the novel winds and backtracks, it is a convincing psychological unraveling. A question, after this strong second book, is whether Harrison can manage this sort of powerful hold on the reader while being somewhat less gaudy in her use of stage effects.