FICTION

RESTRAINT: A Novel by Sherry Sonnett (Simon & Schuster: $21; 319 pp.). If the gods are kind Sherry Sonnet will not, with her first novel, “Restraint,” have created a new genre of fiction. It’s usually a good sign when a book doesn’t fit existing categories, but who needs . . . shall we call it hard-core romance? Feminist Gothic? Moralistic pornography? The germ at the heart of “Restraint” is a pretty good one: Vega Johnson, a savvy, professional financial adviser, learns of her own unchartered depths from an unexpected sexual liaison, that she can play the game of life--of love, of money, of power--by rules of her own making. And Sonnett--identified, no doubt for marketing reasons, as having “recently earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School”--tells Vega’s story snappily, in the first person. Reading “Restraint” is a fundamentally unpleasant experience, however, for Vega is an improbably superficial protagonist, and the novel, in chronicling her story, exploitative. Sonnett is at bottom a packager of titillation: one imagines her figuring out how to link progressively more adventurous sex scenes--missionary, then advanced hetero, then lesbian, then voyeuristic, etc.--in which Vega, initially passive, becomes gradually more active, to the point that she is able to dominate the men that once dominated her, in life as well as in bed. The financial-world setting seems designed to give the book contemporary appeal; the criminal nature of Vega’s new paramour, to provide an aura of potential violence and, eventually, a gun. “Restraint” is a television movie waiting to happen, more Tinseltown treatment, really, than novel.