Novels range from outstanding to insufferable

‘Ellen’ returns
Kaye Gibbons' debut novel, "Ellen Foster," came out in 1987, but the book reached a huge new audience in 1997, when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. Ellen, an 11-year-old orphan, has a hard-knock life to rival Little Orphan Annie's, but at the end of the book, finally ends up with a promising foster mother, Laura. Now Gibbons has brought Ellen back, in "The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster," (Harcourt, $23). Nearly 20 years have passed in our world, but just three in Ellen's — she's now 15, secure in life with the loving Laura, and writing a letter to the president of Harvard explaining why she should be admitted.

Many readers, especially women, were drawn to Ellen's resilient personality and blunt yet beautiful language in the original book. For some of them, it will be enough to have her back for another go-round. Gibbons has recaptured Ellen's quirky way of thinking and her indefatigable spirit. There are lines here that can be read over and over, and a few hundred pages spent with Ellen is a pleasant experience indeed. Sometimes her observations are laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes they simply ring with a vital and impressive truth.

But the plot does meander — whole scenes seem superfluous, and even Ellen herself is a bit too perfect to be believed. The book's ending seems to come from a different world entirely — candy-coated and just too perfect, with loose ends not only wrapped up, but tied in a gorgeous bow. Clear-eyed Ellen herself would be the last person who would buy a finale this rosy, and neither do her readers.    —G.F.C.

No sleep till ‘Brooklyn’
As much fun as it is for Brooklynites to spot neighborhood landmarks in Paul Auster’s latest, “The Brooklyn Follies” (Henry Holt, $24), and as deftly as Auster can still turn a phrase, the novel doesn’t quite work. 

The plot — a patchwork family reunion wrapped in a series of mysteries — drags in some spots and feels rushed, or too pat, in others; it’s less a considered, complete story than an excuse for Auster to hold forth on various unrelated subjects for a few paragraphs, or use up a year or two’s worth of clever bon mots from his notebooks.

Auster has a wonderful sense of the language’s native grandness, and when he talks about “the great spectacle of human crookedness,” or muses on passing gas (“the only sane course of action is denial”), he’s at his urbane, incisive best.  Unfortunately, he couches much of that lofty prose as first-person dialogue, which turns likable characters into pedants — and he devotes too much attention to unlikable characters, without giving the reader much reason to change her mind.

Any book that describes a man’s future as “cast to the four winds like fistful of confetti” is at least somewhat worthwhile, but more forceful plotting — and fewer didactic side trips away from the central story — would have made “The Brooklyn Follies” a top-notch story instead of a curio.    —Sarah D. Bunting

‘Accidental’ wonder
A mysterious stranger comes into the lives of an unhappy British family in Ali Smith's “The Accidental” (Pantheon, $23). When a barefoot woman, Amber, shows up at the Smarts' Norfolk summer rental, she plays on their misperceptions about her identity to gain access not only to their homes, but to their lives. To each family member, the stranger becomes either the comfort or the confrontation needed to shake them out of their respective dream states.

This is already a family of unspoken words and hidden lives — son Magnus is quietly torturing himself over hurting a schoolmate, but to other family members, he’s just mysteriously sullen. By using alternating characters to narrate each chapter, Smith shows viewers each one’s most private thoughts — those secrets that they can’t even share with one another.  Each character's voice stays distinctive and intimate, letting the reader feel that he or she is eavesdropping on the family's innermost thoughts.

The book’s mystery isn’t so much about Amber, it’s about the Smart family's real lives, which come into view like a Polaroid photo, at first indistinct and then with full, pure images. Smith thrills with her ability to surprise readers and the characters with each twist the plot takes.    —Paige Newman

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