The ObserverFictionReviewWhat makes the women of an American town go on a sex strike? The rather unconvincing supernatural cause doesn't spoil an otherwise warm, worldly and witty novel

Robby and Dory Lang are so popular with the students at their suburban New Jersey high school that they pass the "Teacher of the Year" title between them year after year. Their colleagues envy their marriage for its "stability and reciprocity, the lack of sexism, the love and the passion" – but mostly for the passion. Meg Wolitzer spends pages of her ninth novel lovingly emphasising their conviction that, come what may, "Warmly, hotly, tirelessly, in their own bed they would stay." Naturally, they're proved wrong.

The novel opens with a new school term, and with it the arrival of Fran Heller, a fierce and fearless drama teacher who raises eyebrows by announcing that the school play will be Lysistrata, Aristophanes's comedy about women staging a sex strike. As rehearsals begin, so too does "the enchantment": abruptly, completely, the women of Stellar Plains lose their desire for sex, and not even Dory is exempt. It's her shock that strikes the hardest, but the novel's other women are just as vividly and sympathetically drawn. There's Leanne, the beautiful and polygamous (at least until the spell strikes) school psychologist and Bev, the overweight guidance counsellor whose husband cruelly tells her that she's "really let herself go". There's also Dory's daughter, Willa, who undergoes a compelling transformation as she falls in love and lust for the first time.

The enchantment itself, though, is a little hammy – a literal icy wind that whooshes up nightgowns and under bedsheets. We're reminded far too frequently of its taking hold. ("All around Stellar Plains, the same low, hard wind was beginning to blow [...] and it would keep doing that for weeks, making its circuit, taking its time.") It's Lysistrata itself, under Fran's incantatory direction, that's causing this bewitchment, and here's the novel's problem: the idea that literature could cast a literal spell seems far too naive a hope for a novel so attuned to gloomier 21st-century truths, specifically that "the intimacy of reading had been traded in for the rapid absorption of information. And the intimacy of love, well that had often been traded in for something far more public and open." That said, Wolitzer reminds us that desire is often as inexplicable as a magic spell itself, and this goes some way in justifying an otherworldly element in an otherwise wonderfully worldly novel.

While the adults fret about the decline in reading, their adolescent offspring spend hours in Farrest, a virtual online forest where they wander as avatars, occasionally entering desultory conversations with peers. Wolitzer's description of these teenagers' aimless, compulsive online lives is beautifully droll. She's shrewd, too, on how "this whole generation of kids had fully integrated sex into their lives". With the reclamation of the word "slut" so conspicuously under way in recent weeks, there's a neatly topical mention of two girls wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "SLUT 1" and "SLUT 2". They insist it's ironic but when asked to explain exactly how, "neither girl could".

Dory wonders why their kids don't find a real forest instead. "She knew she sounded asinine even as she said this," Wolitzer writes, "but she couldn't stop herself." Later, seeing novels for sale on the street "as if their owners were surrendering them in an act of radical housecleaning for the new century", Dory/Wolitzer reflects: "The changes in reading were all bound up not only with technology but love and sex too, though it was hard to tease it all apart." But isn't "teasing it all apart" essentially the novelist's job description? Dory's asinine plaints are endearing but Wolitzer's evasions are frustrating.

This is a gentle novel, concerned with gentle, good things: how to make love last, find and cherish intimacy, ensure that books matter. That, along with Wolitzer's humane and witty voice, makes it a delight to read. But when order is eventually restored to Stellar Plains and the story winds to its consolatory end, I couldn't help wishing for a little more catastrophe.

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