Disclosure. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Michael Coren

Disclosure, by Michael Crichton (Knopf, 400 pp., $24)

ONE REALLY has to admire the masters and mistresses of the middle-brow, those novelists who swoop down upon an issue that is capturing headlines and soundbites and make it the theme of a best-selling novel. Are they vultures or are they eagles? The answer will vary from reader to reader. But for me Michael Crichton's wing-span, his grace in flight, and the clarity of his vision place him firmly in the eagle's nest.

We experienced some of this author's gifts when he dealt with Japanese-American relations in Rising Sun, genetic engineering in Jurassic Park, and the future of the rainforest in Congo. At his most astute and poignant Mr. Crichton popularizes and, in the best sense of the word, simplifies highly complex ideas and controversies and presents them in the form of novels for mass consumption. Because of the nature of the subjects that he has already tackled, it seemed only a matter of time before Mr. Crichton took on that contemporary chimera, sexual harassment. I use the term "chimera" because, although workplace harassment does obviously exist, and although it is vulgar and unjust, it is clearly not as ubiquitous and one-sided as some would have us believe. As with the well-publicized figures on rape, child abuse, and homosexuality, subjective experience must now take precedence over tendentious and fraudulent research. There are no longer lies, damned lies, and statistics; there are now statistics, damned statistics, and lies.

But Mr. Crichton has done more than question the conventional wisdom about sexual harassment: he has turned that wisdom completely on its head. "The advantage of a role-reversal story is that it may enable us to examine aspects concealed by traditional responses and conventional rhetoric," he writes in his brief afterword. This is provocative stuff, for to question the racial or gender exclusivity of self-awarded victim status is to kick at the very foundations of modern liberalism.

The plot of the book is relatively straightforward. Tom Sanders is a married, happy, deliberately average, and thus altogether believable executive at a Seattle high-tech company who is expecting a promotion to vice president. The prize is taken from him, however, by a rival. She is Meredith Johnson, an attractive and intelligent woman with whom he had conducted an affair some ten years earlier. One evening she invites him into her office for a private, after-work meeting and tries to seduce him. She is partly successful, but his conscience extinguishes his lust and he runs out of the room with his lascivious colleague's wine glass just inches behind his head.

And then the fun begins. Female boss claims that male underling harassed her. The suitably repugnant and insidious company lawyer, a man known as PC Phil, gleefully takes up the case and informs the innocent Sanders that he is to be exiled to a branch plant where he will have effectively no chance of future promotion. The "contemporary climate" is such that men were assumed to be guilty of anything they were accused of," as Mr. Crichton puts it. "Don't smile at a child on the street, unless you're with your wife," is the book's lugubrious but wise advice. "Don't ever touch a strange child. Don't ever be alone with someone else's child .... This was a world of regulations and penalties entirely unknown to women." Nonetheless, Tom Sanders decides to fight back.

With the help of a woman lawyer who is renowned, ironically, for her prosecution of men charged with sexual harassment, Sanders digs a trench, a gaping wound, into the premise upon which this sexual power-play has been built, and in so doing also exposes corruption and hypocrisy within his own company. The PC notion that all men are potential harassers and abusers is shown to be a proposition so weak it ought to be attached to a life-support system. In some quarters Michael Crichton has made himself a very unpopular man indeed.

The flaw in the book is its lack of balance. The divide between good and evil is seldom as obvious and crisp as it appears here, and Mr. Crichton might do well to recall Hilaire Belloc's comment that "the bad are at their most bad when they appear at their least bad." There is also the troubling absence of any major female voice, an omission that tilts the book and occasionally gives it an unsavory and unsatisfying flavor. But in the final analysis this doesn't matter very much and is probably best observed as a form of redressment. Mr. Crichton, or anybody else who wrote a similar book and argued a similar thesis, would be accused of rampant misogyny no matter how sensitive and empathetic he attempted to be.

The author has dragged a steaming and obfuscated problem before the eyes of millions of people. It is not an issue that will be dismissed, nor indeed is it an issue that should be dismissed. And it is because of its very importance that the definition and judgment of sexual harassment and the concomitant wrongs of rape and domestic violence ought to be, must be, taken out of the hands of the neurotic, the needy, and the nasty and given to objective, moderate men and women.