FICTION

VIRTUAL LOVE by Avodah Offit (Simon & Schuster: $22; 318 pp.). It’s got a rousing fictional set-up--the unhappy sex therapist obsessed by the beautiful, mortally ill virgin/whore, a patient whose vaginismus prevents her from being sexually penetrated. It also has a shocking conclusion, and a singular form, consisting of the e-mail letters between the hot-and-bothered therapist and his female mentor. For all that, though, “Virtual Love” is a flop as a novel, psychiatrist and sex therapist Avodah Offit being unable to give her over-the-top story, or exaggerated characters, much depth. Toni, the virgin/whore, is little more than a plot device providing San Francisco therapist Marc Martell with an excuse to contact Aphra Zion, ostensibly for professional advice but soon for confessional purposes. The two communicate electronically, and we voyeuristically read their correspondence, plus Aphra’s private, computer-filed reactions to Marc’s troubled and troubling missives. It’s mainly in these entries that Offit, author of the nonfiction “The Sexual Self” and “Night Thoughts: Reflections of a Sex Therapist,” writes compellingly; Aphra’s recollections of her youth, marriages and medical training make the virtual and vaginismal aspects of the book seem like overheated gimmicks. There is a novel here struggling to get out, but it belongs to Aphra, not Marc: He’s a selfish and not very interesting character, the sort of sex therapist who gives sex therapists a bad name.