The Electric Adventures of Alvin, Part Two is a book about a book. Its tormented protagonist is mail-room employee Adam Schakowski, an obsessive-compulsive atheist beset by a fixation with ``Femaleness,’’ an insistence on using the proper words for things, and a dilemma: Unbeknownst to his family or friends, he secretly wrote a pornographic novel a couple years ago about the burgeoning world of Internet sex. It wasn’t a book he’d expected anyone to take seriously (``whacking material, nothing more,’’ he tells one journalist). But readers, reviewers and Congress had other ideas. The book has become a political controversy and a runaway bestseller.

This unexpected success is catastrophic for Mr. Schakowski because, as he explains, the novel wasn’t as fictional as its legions of fans were led to believe. Now his adored but oblivious wife – encouraged by ``those smut-peddling perverts at The New York Times’’ and other mainstream reviewers – is about to read the book.

``Pseudonym or no, she will recognize me there, and herself, and her old friend Guinevere (you know her, from the book, as `Gem’),’’ he explains. ``I figure I should be packed and ready to move out by the time she hits chapter four.’’

In the meantime, he offers us the story behind the story, ``all those questions that are usually answered on the back of the book jacket, but weren’t on Alvin.’’ Employing a jumbled collection of files from his computer hard-drive – Internet chat logs, newspaper articles, biblical passages, Congressional transcripts – he recounts his life, from his first boyish crush on an angelic Catholic school teacher, to his tangled college relationship with his future wife and her nymphomaniac roommate, to his discovery of a whole new universe of obsessions through the lumbering, outdated computer at his kitchen table. And, finally, how he came to unwittingly pioneer the realm of binary sex with a neurotic group of rediscovered friends from his past and faceless new ones online – the central characters of a book that no one was supposed to notice.

``You must believe me when I tell you I never intended any of this,’’ he pleads with us. ``It started innocently, a new and more electric method of masturbation, nothing more. I’m still not clear exactly where it was that I took the turn which has led me, disastrously, to The New York Times bestseller list.’’