SOURCE: A review of Disclosure, in The Yale Review, Vol. 82, No. 4, October, 1994, pp. 121-32.

Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following review of Disclosure, she faults Crichton's facile manipulation of deep-seated anxieties about women and his poorly developed sexual harassment theme.

Some years ago I had the misfortune to read a magazine essay by a writer and academic colleague in which he bravely charted his dogged struggle to see women as human beings. One measure of the psychic distance he had traveled was his ability to admit that he had once belonged to a college fraternity in which a ritual of initiation or bonding (I forget the exact purpose) required that a fraternity brother go out on the street, select a woman at random, and bite her on the buttocks.

One would need to have spent the last decade on another...