Virtual Love is presented in the form of an e-mail exchange between Aphra Zion, psychiatrist and sex therapist, and another screwed-up psychiatrist, Marc, who hasn't slept with his wife since she got pregnant (and their kid is now old enough to learn to read) and is in love with one of his patients, a beautiful Hegelian thinker who hasn't ever been able to let a man penetrate her. Marc thinks he has the ultimate cure, but his morals (and fear of being professionally ostracized) are holding him back.
For Aphra, online existence is far more inspiring than the humdrum reality of treating patients. Like the neurotic woman who gets so turned on after she kills her unfaithful lover that she then kills her rich husband. Or the middle-aged woman whose father called her Miss America and sexually abused her so that it was impossible for her to make love until an artist spent almost a year warming up her frozen inner core. The only thing Aphra likes better than listening to these confessions of sexual frustration is writing her own to Marc via e-mail.
Aphra initially tells Marc of some of her more bizarre patients, but then she retreats to her past, and in perceptive detail relates the traumatic incidents in her wretched childhood, wretched former marriage, and wretched current marriage. In return, Marc e-mails her about his traumatic experiences - the death of his younger brother, abandonment by his mother - and the two online lovers realize they share a virtual past.
For a while, the doctors become so engrossed in their online relationship, it seems they prefer it to reality. Says Aphra: "What goes on in my mind has always seemed more real than life. Writing to you, communicating in this virtual way, has a stronger reality than any verbal exchange or relationship." Both characters use e-mail to express unactionable desires: Marc wants to screw his frigid patient; Aphra wants to have an affair with anyone else "as a rite of independent celebration." Both, of course, are on the verge of leaving their mates.
This book makes clear that Net-based behavior has always been the stuff of psychiatry. That's why it's a clever concept to use e-mail to mirror the thought processes and feelings of these two messed-up docs - it's all virtual, except for the reader who gets a vicarious thrill from getting inside these characters' heads.
Virtual Love, by Avodah Offit, US$22. Simon & Schuster: (800) 223 2348, +1 (515) 284 6751.
STREET CRED
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