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Logline: A mail-room worker's secret life threatens to collapse when his pornographic autobiography becomes a critically acclaimed bestseller.

Style: First-person narrative, mingled with literary, religious and pop-culture excerpts, all presented in short passages that have been dumped randomly from files in the narrator’s computer.

Themes: Technology as sex; sex as religion

Length: 124,000 words (359 pages)

Summary (contains spoilers):

Protagonist Adam Schakowski, a low-income mail-room worker, addresses readers who are assumed to have read his earlier, anonymously written book, The Electric Adventures of Alvin. He describes it as a work of unmitigated pornography, which has unexpectedly been sanctified as serious literature by media critics, causing it to become a politically controversial best seller.

This sets up Schakowski’s central dilemma: His wife, Beth, is unaware of his authorship of the earlier book. But all the media hype has prompted her to buy a paperback copy of it. Schakowski is certain that when she reads it, she will realize he is the author – thus exposing to her his secret ``Inner Life’’ of sexual obsession, which includes a complex web of Internet lovers and a real-world tryst with Beth’s nymphomaniac friend Guinevere.

As Schakowski waits in a panic for Beth to begin reading the book, he recounts his life, past and present. To prevent Beth from coming across the story in the computer that they share, he writes in small, jumbled pieces of first-person narrative, each topped with computer file codes. These are mixed with other excerpts from his computer hard-drive, including newspaper articles, chat logs, and transcripts of his testimony before the ``Senate Ad-Hoc Subcommittee on Electronic Pornography,’’ which subpoenaed him last year to testify about his book. (In a deal with Schakowski’s lawyer, the subcommittee agrees to let him keep his public anonymity by wearing a mask; he chooses a Marilyn Monroe mask, a metaphor for his secret double-life.)

The first-person narrative and the other excerpts, strung together, give us Schakowski’s central philosophy in life: That there is no God, and that the closest thing to divinity is found within what he calls ``Femaleness.’’

As he tells his story, we gradually see his personality. He is compulsively neat and organized, plagued by what Beth calls a ``desire for an orderly universe.’’ He is dismissive of material trappings, including his sudden, secret wealth from the book (he feels guilty that he can’t tell Beth, who is diligently scraping together money to reupholster a cherished antique rocker she inherited). He is so obsessed with femininity and fantasy that he almost can’t function in daily life; his repeated attempts to produce serious literary fiction, for example, fail again and again because his high-minded metaphorical ideas invariably denigrate into sex stories (several of which he offers to us within his narrative). His best ``real-world’’ friend is a 400-pound male homosexual co-worker named Clarence, Schakowski’s one and only concession to maleness, which he generally views as a ``junk gender.’’

On the Internet, he has become the leader of a group of sexually compulsive chatters. (One of them, ``JaneyX,’’ has discovered his true identity as the author of the book and is blackmailing him for money, which he views as a minor aggravation.) He won’t let his literary agent, Carol, meet him in person, which complicates his attempts to fantasize about her. He bristles at pornographic language, but revels in using proper female anatomical terms. He considers the trend toward vaginal shaving to be an abomination, because it makes women look like girls. (``Why turn wine into grape juice?’’ he asks.) At various times during the ``hotter’’ parts of his narrative, he interrupts himself with the phrase, ``Excuse me a moment,’’ indicating that he is taking a break to masturbate.

Schakowski’s obsession with women (we learn, as he recounts his past) began as a boy. Motherless, he was raised by his stoic, elderly father and his mentally handicapped uncle. The other examples of masculinity he encountered weren’t much better – particularly a thin-lipped priest who couldn’t answer a simple question about Adam and Eve – but women were another matter. Schakowski, as a boy, becomes fixated on the literary character of Rose-of-Sharon Joad (who breast-feeds the starving man in The Grapes of Wrath), even as he falls in love with a Catholic school teacher, Mrs. McCormick, who is in the midst of a crisis of faith. Later, in high school, a meek, small-breasted classmate named Mindy designates him as a platonic pal and proceeds to let him in on an array of feminine secrets.

In college, his obsession with ``Femaleness’’ continues to grow, finding root in a strip club near campus; in an overweight feminist professor who touts the man-hating philosophy of Andrea Dworkin; and, most of all, in a sexually obsessed fellow student named Guinevere, who, Schakowski decides, is a female version of himself. (It’s not an altogether comfortable conclusion, as he comes to understand how cruel and dangerous she is with her sexuality.) He falls in love with Guinevere’s friend and roommate, Beth, a fellow atheist and, Schakowski concludes, the kind of calm, even-keeled, ``normal’’ woman he needs to balance out his own obsessions. Despite his determination to build a stable life with Beth, he slips and has sex with Guinevere one morning, an intense encounter that for the rest of the story defines his struggle between the bright, normal life he wants with Beth and the dark, carnal one that beckons him.

Years later, that beckoning is given a name: the Internet, where Schakowski stumbles upon Guinevere, and then Mindy, his old high school friend. Guinevere is now teaching aerobics in Los Angeles by day and prowling singles bars at night, still feeding her ferocious sexual appetite. Mindy is a paralegal and a wife and mother, whose schoolgirl innocence has given way to an intense sexual frustration; her husband, Darrin, was once chivalrous and attentive, but has lost interest in her, which sends her looking for attention online. Schakowski forms a renewed, close bond with Mindy, even as he resumes the tense, arm’s-length fascination he had had in college with Guinevere. Other faceless chatters join their group, sharing their fantasies and becoming a kind of secret society of sexual obsession. Schakowski, though still in love with Beth and still in need of her stability and normalcy, comes to realize that this is the place he has been looking for his whole life: a forum where women allow themselves to drop the masks of propriety they wear out in the ``real world’’ and open their Inner Lives to him.

It’s an almost religious revelation to him, and, he explains, it’s what prompted him to begin writing his book. It starts as a project to amuse his online friends, and to titillate himself (the thought of women reading his words has become his prime obsession by this point). Even when, to his surprise, the book gets published, he assumes it will end up displayed on the hidden shelves of adult bookstores, with no danger of Beth finding it there. Instead, it quickly becomes a kind of bible for cyber-culture – then, helped along by bafflingly favorable reviews in major media, it breaks into the world of mainstream literature, as Schakowski watches in horror.

Near the end, Schakowski, panic-stricken, informs us that Beth is, at that moment, beginning to read the book.

A series of short newspaper excerpts describes what happens next: Beth files for divorce. Her attorney publicly reveals Schakowski’s identity as the real ``Alvin,’’ and exposes the identities of others described in the book. JaneyX (the blackmailer) subsequently files suit against Schakowski, claiming his book has caused her emotional distress. Guinevere, reveling in her sudden celebrity, gets her own book deal – as well as a Playboy magazine pictorial spread. As the controversy grows, sales of the book skyrocket.

Finally (according to a newspaper excerpt), Schakowski is shot and wounded by a gunman who, we learn, is Mindy’s husband Darrin, who apparently has rediscovered his former chivalry.

In the final chapter, Schakowski is writing to us from his hospital bed, where he is recovering from the shooting. His narrative is no longer in the form of disparate computer files, since his secret is out and there’s no need to hide anything anymore. He tells of the intense media scrutiny of him now, how odd it is to hear his real name on the cable news shows, and how he waves out his window to the feminist and Christian protestors picketing outside the hospital. His doctor clearly disapproves of having him for a patient. A young redheaded nurse sheepishly asks him to autograph his book for her, causing him to construct a fantasy in which she changes his dressings in the nude.

Beth visits him in the hospital and hints at a possible reconciliation, but leaves it unresolved; after she exits, he arranges to have her antique rocker fully restored, and finds it’s the first time he has ever enjoyed spending money. His agent, Carol, also visits, the first time he has seen her face; she is giddy from the explosive book sales caused by the shooting, and pressures him to write a sequel. Mindy calls and tearfully apologizes for the shooting; Schakowski doesn’t believe an apology is necessary.

In the final pages, Schakowski wonders whether it’s time for him to finally rein in his Inner Life. ``People who end up in the hospital because they eat badly or drink too much might reasonably be expected to use their convalescence to rethink those lifestyles, with their sterile white surroundings serving as their reminder of just how serious it’s gotten,’’ he notes. ``Shouldn’t my own excesses, having proven just as potentially deadly, prompt a similar rethinking?’’

Even after the redheaded nurse fulfills his fantasy – opening her blouse to let him look at her breasts while she changes his dressings, and then telling him she will stand guard outside the door so that he can masturbate in privacy – he promises himself that he will instead watch television until his erection goes away. But this resolution doesn’t last long. He starts mentally reviewing what he has learned from the events surrounding his book, pondering what big epiphanies he should be experiencing about life and religion and ``truth.’’ And he finally determines that none those deep questions are as philosophically relevant to him as the sight of the redheaded nurse’s breasts.

``She opened her blouse for me. Think about that,’’ he ponders, in the final sentences. ``She opened her blouse for no reason other than to help a tired fellow human leave this gray old world for awhile and go somewhere prettier. She opened it like a gate.’’ He ends with: ``Excuse me a moment.’’

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