The Metaphysical Touchanetti

In an appealingly loose and intelligent style, first novelist and short story writer Brownrigg (Ten Women Who Shook the World) charts a very modern romance, with rounded characters tentatively making their way to love and enlightenment via the Internet. In 1992, when the Internet is a novelty, Emily Piper (Pi) is a graduate student in philosophy who retreats to Mendocino, Calif., after an earthquake-related fire destroys her Berkeley apartment, her dissertation-in-progress and her cat. Hoping to get her bearings, she moves into a summer house with Abbie, an acquaintance in the middle of a divorce, and her young daughter. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, computer technician JD Levin is writing his so-called dieryan account of his suicidal depression in the wake of losing his joband posting it on a discussion group, where it soon attracts a flurry of comments. Full of mordant quips and neurotic observations (plus endearing references to his dog), the voice of the diery is so distinctive its almost animate. Eventually, Pi plugs into the Internet and gets so involved in the diery that she starts corresponding with JD. At first Pi is wary and cool, and JD is seemingly asexual, but their correspondence becomes increasingly intimate. But Pi, who has what she calls sapphic undercurrents, has an affair with Abbie, and JD departs the East Coast for L.A. When Pi realizes that she cant locate him on screen, she decides to search for him, but the timing couldnt be worse: the Rodney King verdict has just been announced and the city is in flames. Brownrigg has Nora Ephrons ability to make romance seem a complex affair of both the heart and the head, and she adds a dimension of adroit philosophizing about the purpose of life and the possibilities of love in a world where emotional isolation seems sensible and self-protective. Her grip on her characters psychologies and flair for breezy, seductive narrative will have readers as magnetically addicted to this book as its characters are to their e-mail, and her rich atmospheric detail about Northern California could cause a small tourist boomlet there. (June)