Chastened, By Hephzibah Anderson

"Only my book in bed/ Knows how I look in bed," laments the narrator of Lorenz Hart's terrific "Why Can't I?" (1929 ). Told that "what you need is romance,/ Something in pants", she realises that "two feet are ever cold; / Four feet are never cold". Some have assumed that Hephzibah Anderson, in eschewing men for a year, donned bedsocks, turned up the electric blanket and slurped Ovaltine with another book against her chest. In fact, Chastened contains much more than at first apparent. A journalist as often in Manhattan as London, Anderson reached a point when she found that "sex and its pursuit seem to have become such blood sports, their rules so confusing... that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it's worth it".

With hopes more often dashed than fulfilled, she decided to step off the merry-go-round for a year - or at least to continue with some of it while holding back from a leap between any sheets. She knew this might seem illogical: "it had to do with numbers as well - those tallies we each carry around with us, inscribed in our minds because they don't always belong in our hearts), in the faintest pencil lest anyone see them. Mine is a greater number than I'd like", while "we all know that the double standard lingers on."

And so she dates, sometimes touchingly, sometimes absurdly, and, all dressed up, joins her sister on one "hope-filled Saturday procession" of a singles party while finding time to digress to the psychology of "remedy dating" which, in theory, cancels out the "type" who had proved wrong previously. Along the way come Milton's view of nuns and the mechanics of HBO series (bizarrely, studios hire sexual choreographers for these scenes).

At its heart, halfway through, while discussing online encounters and spirit-sapping e-mails, she wonders who now meets as they did in, say, Woody Allen movies. "One couple I know traded lingering looks, smouldering looks, and finally words... in one of the world's most romantic places, the New York Public Library's 42nd Street branch, but theirs is an increasingly rare story." One could turn to John Wells's London Library history. He observed that "there is, as in most libraries, a heavily charged erotic atmosphere".

For all the unabashed descriptions of a fling's joy, Chastened continually meditates upon human relationships, those unspoken words, those foolish things as redolent as any lusty yell. As on 42nd Street, silence - telepathy - is truly arousing. Silence can stimulate, something equally true beyond a library, in what Anderson calls "a super-sexualised society that uses orgasms to flog shampoo". Whether reminiscing or discussing Elizabeth Abbott's hefty history of celibacy, Chastened is more than fashionably dinky. One hopes that Anderson will write the novels evidently within her.