Twin orphans. An Australian novelist. A Catholic schoolgirl on a mission. Diner guys. Readers meet a varied mix of characters in this season's roundup of novels.

Tangled 'Stitch'
John Rolfe Gardiner’s “Double Stitch” (Counterpoint, $25) tells the story of twin girls, Becca and Linny, who at age 10 in 1926 come to live at the Drayton Orphanage.

At first, they make a game of fooling those around them into thinking one of them is the other. But soon they are driven apart by their copper skin and the knowledge that they come from mixed-race backgrounds.

Orphanage director Eula Kierland feels a special kinship with the girls, and seeks help understanding them from Otto Rank (based on the Freudian disciple) and his lover Anais Nin.

Counterpoint Press

Upon graduation from the orphanage, the girls find themselves on separate paths: one to San Francisco and one to China, both with tragic consequences. Yet, even apart, they still feel the connection that will inevitably draw them back together.

Though it’s an interesting premise for a novel, the characters never seem fully realized. And though the story involves great journeys, in terms of development, the characters never really go anywhere.

It’s interesting to stumble on the likes of Rank and Nin, but they seem simply like window-dressing, not really adding or detracting from the story as a whole.

Gardiner wrote the award-winning “Somewhere in France,” but with this book he falters, never really finding the emotional story he wants to tell. Instead, it seems slightly clinical: an examination of the twins rather than an attempt to understand them.    —Paige Newman

Not quite a novel
More like a series of essays than a novel, “Elizabeth Costello” by J.M. Coetzee (Viking, $21.95), examines everything from animal rights to realism to the nature of evil. Ostensibly, the work is about an Australian novelist remembered primarily for one long-ago book based on Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Costello’s now on the lecture circuit and the book is comprised of a series of her lectures and a bit of narrative that surrounds them.

Viking Press

Costello makes some amazing assertions in her lectures. In her lecture on animal rights, she compares a slaughterhouse to a concentration camp. In a lecture in Africa, she wonders aloud why there are no important African authors. And in her most compelling lecture on the nature of evil and the novelist, she poses the question of whether an author can be damaged by delving into the atrocities of evil and whether he or she should go to those dark places.

It would be wrong to give away the end of the novel, but it should be said that all the intellectual musings Costello does throughout the novel come into play in a startling way.

It’s hard not to get drawn into Costello’s lectures, yet you may find yourself wondering, Where’s the narrative? There is none. You get to know Costello primarily through her ideas, those she expresses as well as those she self-edits. It’s an interesting change of pace from this award-winning novelist.    —P.N.

Unwrap 'The Gift'
If you've ever worried that the gift you've given a friend wasn't good enough, you're bound to enjoy "The Gift" (Fourth Estate, $23.95) a new comic novel by British author David Flusfeder. The novel takes that worry to its extremes. Phillip, a instruction-manual translator and aspiring screenwriter, strives to match the gifts given by a wealthier couple, Sean and Barry. Their gifts are along the lines of a handmade corkscrew imported from Italy and a skiing holiday.

Fourth Estate

Phillip becomes obsessed with the notion that every time they give him something he has to give them something better in return, yet since he doesn't have the finances to do so, he ends up spending wildly and the gifts get more and more outrageous. He begins ignoring his wife and young twins and everything else in his life in the quest for these perfect gifts and grows more and more angry with his friends for their continual generosity. He spends too much money, lies to his wife, and even winds up in jail at one point. He ultimately decides that the perfect gift for his friend Barry would be to track down one of the members of the band Pink Floyd.

Flusfeder has some wonderful comic touches in the novel, such the way Phillip assigns a numeric value to each gift exchanged, keeping an account of exactly how much he owes. This book is easy to cruise through in a couple sittings. It's successful because Phillip's obsession seems like the extremes of "normal" behavior instead of simply being nuts. You get the feeling that if he could channel all the gift-giving energy somewhere else, he might actually be a productive person. Pick it up and you'll never obsess over the size of a gift again.    —P.N.

Citizen Welles
"Me and Orson Welles" (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50) opens like an exercise in wish fulfillment. Robert Kaplow's teenage protagonist Richard daydreams about being serendipitously discovered by a Broadway producer as he strolls the streets of New York; mere minutes later he runs smack-dab into Orson Welles and is drafted into the role of Lucius in Welles' groundbreaking 1937 production of "Julius Caesar."

MacAdam / Cage

For the first two-thirds of the novel, everything goes swimmingly, save for a minor disaster with the Mercury Theater's sprinkler system. It's an effervescent series of madcap antics, including players falling through stage traps and Welles taking an ambulance to lunch to beat Manhattan traffic, all set to rollicking vaudevillian dialogue. Kaplow convincingly evokes both the prewar era (this particular "Caesar" is "done without togas," the cast costumed instead in the brown shirts of fascism) and Welles' reputed megalomania, which swells to fill the entire theater.

Of course we're being set up for a sucker punch, and young Richard ultimately learns that genius is not necessarily benevolent as he and Welles compete for the possession of the same woman. Still, it's almost a relief when some dramatic tension is finally inserted into the storyline -- before the love triangle arises, Richard's biggest worry is getting in hot water with his mom for not raking the leaves.    —Kim Rollins

'St. Ursula's Girls'
It's nigh-impossible to review a book about an idealistic, emotionally isolated, disillusioned New York teenager flunking out of private school without making reference to Holden Caulfield, so let's get that out of the way. The main character in Valerie Hurley's "St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb" (MacAdam/Cage, $19) rails against "counterfeit persons," or, more colloquially, "phonies." She scrawls in her journal "It seems to me that what being an adult entails is learning to curb your most authentic impulses and slowly becoming ersatz."

MacAdam / Cage Publishing

Stylistically, though, Hurley and J. D. Salinger are worlds apart. "St. Ursula's Girls" is the textual equivalent of a flip-book of impressionist paintings; each one gorgeous, emblematic, and glimpsed only momentarily. Hurley tips her hand and shows us her literary influence in her epigraph, a quote from Rainier Maria Rilke -- and in case you missed that, has furthermore has taken the liberty of naming her protagonist Raine Marie.

Raine has chosen to identify as Jewish although she's three-quarters Catholic -- the impression is that she labels herself a Jew to put her feelings of oppression into a larger, historical frame: she must be put-upon in an official capacity. Her foil and wailing-wall in the book is Al, the guidance counselor at St. Ursula's.

It's difficult to feel a emotional stake in the dissolution of Al's marriage, whose better days are largely left to our imagination. When Raine turns 18 midway through the narrative, it seems like an ill-advised set-up for a romantic entanglement which thankfully never comes to pass; instead, the two characters find their own redemption in their attempts to rescue one another.    —K.R.

Back to the diner
If I have a favorite movie, it's Barry Levinson's "Diner," the 1982 film about Baltimore buddies facing the end of their youth and the end of the 1950s with the help of male solidarity and a few tons of French fries and gravy. The characters' easy friendships, witty dialogue, and not-so-hidden fears make this quotable movie soar far above the standard guys' flick.

Broadway Books

Levinson has carried his Baltimore milieu on into other films, so it's not surprising that the characters in his first novel, "Sixty-Six" (Broadway Books, $24), are recognizable. They have different names and slightly different situations, but like the movie characters, they hang out at a Baltimore diner, crack wise with the best of them, and are obviously uncomfortable with the way the world is lurching forward.

I admit I'll read anything that even vaguely connects to the original Diner guys. Levinson's talent for wordplay and for creating likable characters with complicated friendships is familiar and comfortable, and few writers have his eye for dialogue. The Diner guys feel like old friends, and who wouldn't want to reconnect with them?

Yet I was somewhat disappointed in "Sixty-Six." Set seven years after "Diner," the book by necessity revolves around Vietnam, but Neil, the character most touched by the war is, for me, the hardest to get to know. And as in "Diner," Levinson's main character, Bobby, is much more of a cipher than his rowdy pals, and a long plot about his breaking in to local television is dull.

That said, I'd rather spend a few hours with the guys at Levinson's Diner than with most other fictional characters. If you already love the movie, you'll want the book. If you haven't seen the movie, rent it now. If it hooks you in, then buy the book.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Sound of the 'Train'
National Book Award-winner Pete Dexter’s latest novel “Train” (Doubleday, $24.95) tells the story of three people whose lives intersect in painful ways in 1953 Los Angeles. Lionel Walk, nicknamed “Train,” is a 17-year-old African-American caddy at an exclusive golf course. Millard Packard is a cop who recognizes his talent and later backs him in some high-stakes games. Train thinks of him as the “Mile-Away-Man,” as Packard seems perpetually distracted by a hinted-at tragic past.  Norah Still is the woman Packard rescues one night after she’s been brutally raped by two men who’ve hijacked her husband’s yacht.

Doubleday

Dexter creates three characters from different worlds and all of them, particularly Train, are realized with their own distinct voices and modes of thought. The work is also humorous, though darkly so, particularly in the portrayal of Plural, Train’s friend -- a punch-drunk boxer who’s gone blind. The book is violent, but the violence is not over dramatized -- it happens almost on an instant, which makes it feel all the more real.

A dark look at what it means to be rescued, “Train” shows how well-intentioned actions can have unforeseen consequences. There is a sense of inevitability to the novel, as though the characters are riding on tracks toward their destinies -- even while they’re doing everything to try to change those fates. Yet Dexter manages to surprise the reader, primarily through the ways the characters affect one another.

Many things go unexplained in the novel and the ending is as terse and abrupt as most of the violence that’s come before it, but in that way it is satisfying -- for those characters left standing, one can only imagine where their lives may go.    —P.N.

Comatose 'Waking Samuel'
A story of loss and redemption, “Waking Samuel” (Bloomsbury, $23.95) by Daniel Coyle, tells the story of Sara, a nurse who has recently lost her four-year-old son in a car accident. The death weighs on her -- she thinks if she’d struggled harder, she might have been able to save her son. In her grief she turns away from her husband, Tom, -- who in the meantime has become obsessed with organizing and cleaning their home -- and to her duties at the hospital where she works in the traumatic brain injury unit.

Bloomsbury

There she meets a mysterious victim of a gunshot wound. One day he surprises her by speaking, telling her that his name is Samuel and beginning to share his story. Drawn by the idea that she might be able to save someone else, Sara becomes obsessed with him, hiding his progress from the hospital so that she alone can unravel his mystery. But is Samuel who he claims to be?

Unfortunately, Samuel’s past isn’t all that interesting. We end up feeling sympathy for Sara’s plight -- the best scenes in the book are her reminiscences about her son -- but never become involved in what is happening to Samuel or whether or not he is who he says he is. We don’t really care who he is.

An entire novel where the main emotion you feel for the lead character is sympathy (not even empathy), makes for a pretty unsatisfying read. While there are some good moments between Sara and Tom toward the end of the book, Tom is never fully realized until those final scenes, so we’re left a bit outside that intimacy as well. There’s some well-crafted writing here, but overall the novel is unsatisfying.    —P.N.

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