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...