As a parody of the middle class's obsessive concern with privacy, Michael Frayn's new novel [A Very Private Life] begins auspiciously as a bourgeois children's story turned on its head: "Once upon a time there will be …" a land of utter privacy. Children's stories cope with exaggerated fears and hopes by explaining them in comforting homilies as part of a remote world. Frayn retains this style—but places his story in the future and thereby makes us its cause.

His futuristic world is based on McLuhan's aphorism that electronic technology extends our central nervous systems in a global embrace. His characters remain forever in their homes—windowless boxes connected to the outside world by tubes and wires….

All this is well done, but as Frayn's heroine, Uncumber, questions the system we begin to have doubts. Her problem is ours: What outside her home permits this insulated existence? Her world is divided between rulers ("deciders") who live inside the homes and workers ("animals") who live outside and build the homes, repair the tubes and grow the food.

Uncumber, a decider's daughter, discovers an exit to the outside world in a fit of childish rebelliousness. Later she falls in love with [Noli], a worker she accidentally dials on holovision, and that motivates her to use the exit….

Uncumber decides to leave [the outside world]. On the way home she is gassed, abducted by a gang that murders deciders, and finally captured by the police. She is eventually slotted back into the deciders' world, and we are told that "she will live happily forever after." A gratuitous coda suggests future rebelliousness, but by then it hardly matters.

The author is telling us that Uncumber—a representative of our future selves—must choose between utter privacy and communal bestiality. But those are not the real options, and Frayn manipulates his characters and technology in his attempt to prove they are….

Still more seriously, Frayn ignores the political implications of his world. The deciders' private lives depend on a technology that denies privacy—two-way television sets in every room, omnipresent police and drugs to penetrate the unconscious. Indeed, these are the stereotypes of totalitarianism. Yet his deciders live in a utopian democracy. Similarly, his workers are miserable, envious of deciders—and, in gangs, they can attack their homes. Yet as a class they are generally acquiescent and certainly not revolutionary.

Modern technology clearly requires a radical redefinition of privacy…. Frayn has ignored the fact that modern men must solve their problems communally, or there will be no future men, private or communal.