The ''dim, drowned light'' in the basement apartment she rents when his obsessive attention forces her temporarily to withdraw from college after her junior year. You are stunned by the author's imagery of despair: the cockroach she traps under a glass the last night of her father's first visit, when she discovers that he is sleeping with her mother. You read on, for once dreading instead of looking forward to the inevitable consummation. When she drives him to the airport, he kisses her goodbye and ''pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn.'' ''My father looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before.'' Having not seen her since 10 years earlier, when she was 10, he is enthralled by her resemblance to him. Then she goes back to the start of her experience, when she first meets her estranged father as an adult. these nowheres and notimes are the only home we have.'' ''We meet in cities where we've never been before. Her narrative is spare and stark, written in a present tense that perfectly conveys how her experience happened ''out of time as well as out of place.'' ''We meet at airports,'' she begins, plunging the reader straight into the hell of the incestuous affair. She interweaves a series of dire events that occurred during the first 25 years of her life, jumping back and forth in time yet drawing you irresistibly toward the heart of a great evil.

Why do human beings commit incest? In her appalling but beautifully written memoir, ''The Kiss,'' Kathryn Harrison, the novelist, isn't primarily concerned with analyzing what happened between her and her father.

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