The rise of the Internet has unleashed a mostly fetid deluge of paranoid cyber-novels and science-fiction films, Bill Gates biographies, and flip self-help manuals, but unless You've Got Mail counts (and it shouldn't), few have dealt seriously with how relationships work in this relatively new medium. Equal parts love story (of sorts) and philosophical investigation, Sylvia Brownrigg's dense, thoughtful, ambitious first novel, The Metaphysical Touch, takes Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being as a model, but wisely strikes out into its own uncharted territory. Brownrigg's tortured pair have abbreviated names (Pi and J.D.), live on opposite coasts, and are alienated from their friends and family—one by choice, the other by circumstance. Pi, a philosophy graduate student in her final year, lost her Kant dissertation and everything else she owned in the 1991 Berkeley-Oakland fire. As the book opens, she moves north to Mendocino and cuts off nearly all contact with those she cared about in her former life. J.D., mired in a severe existential crisis, has decided to kill himself, but not before posting long missives on an Internet bulletin board. When Pi finally logs on and discovers J.D.'s "Diery" (pun intended), they begin a powerful but tenuous relationship through e-mail. Brownrigg's characters are just as morbidly self-obsessed as they sound, but what redeems The Metaphysical Touch is her perceptive observations on the nature of Internet communication. Without knowing the most basic things about other people, such as appearance or identity, users are left to guess whether they're being honest about themselves or showcasing an entirely fabricated persona. Trust is difficult enough in the flesh, but nearly impossible in this forum. For Brownrigg, herself a philosopher, e-mail is a perfect expression of the mind-body problem, resolved when "the absence of body [has] no effect on the presence of a person in someone's life." Since Pi and J.D. are separated from each other by most of the continental U.S., they're not allowed anything like a conventionally satisfying romance, or even much of a romance at all. But The Metaphysical Touch succeeds in making their connection real and substantial and, in doing so, offers a hopeful vision of a future powered by ideas and the written word.