Three novels into her roundly venerated career, Kathryn Harrison sparked an uproar with her controversial 1997 memoir, The Kiss, which centered on the four-year affair she had with her long-absent father after meeting him as a young adult. In her previous work, Harrison had never shied away from issues of incest and abuse, but removed from the comforting safeguard of fiction, her confessional suddenly amounted to gross exploitation. To her credit, Harrison's compelling and intricately structured follow-up, The Binding Chair, remains unaffected by the critical firestorm, boldly delving into the same treacherous eroticism on which she's staked her reputation. As with The Kiss, she's primarily concerned with how childhood trauma can pervade and even define a person's life throughout adulthood. Spanning four decades, from the turn-of-the-century brothels of Shanghai to the south of France between the world wars, The Binding Chair follows the tumultuous affairs of two women who attempt to abandon their designated place in society. It's hard to imagine a more potent metaphor for female oppression than Chinese foot-binding, a crippling procedure which essentially involves breaking the foot in order to shape it into an unnaturally petite, doll-like miniature. Bound as a little girl, May's choices are as limited as her mobility. Sent off to an arranged marriage with a bigamist husband in rural China, she plots an ill-fated escape that lands her in a Shanghai brothel, where she becomes addicted to opium. She's rescued by a well-heeled Australian gentleman from the Foot Emancipation Society who, ironically, becomes so perversely enraptured with her feet that he winds up marrying her. Back at his brother-in-law's estate, May meets a kindred spirit in her niece, Alice, a precocious teenager who herself embarks on a series of unhealthy sexual relationships. Harrison alternates chapters between May and Alice in their coming-of-age years, effortlessly paralleling their adversities in two different periods until their damaged lives converge for good in the second half. The Binding Chair is occasionally undone by Harrison's taste for sensationalism, but her connection with the subject matter and her assured, seductively limpid prose are hard to resist.