ELLIS ISLAND AND OTHER STORIES

Helprin (A Dove of the East, Refiner's Fire) has a disposition toward felicity, charm, elfin humor. His approach to fiction is picaresque and embroidered, heavily reliant on the artifice common to tellers of optimistic parables. Says one narrator here: "Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art." So Helprin goes looking for just such not-quite-real situations—and sometimes he simply takes incompatible material and forces it into pleasingly artificial shapes. He's best suited, then, to such tintyped-atmosphere pieces as "Martin Bayer," "A Vermont Tale," and "Palais de Justice"—which make vague passes at transcendence. And it's hard to dislike "The Schreuderspritze"—the story of a grieving young man finding redemption simply by vividly dreaming of the Alpine climb he's training for, a story with a starry-eyed gaze that never drops. But if Helprin makes sure that his stories are always likable, he simultaneously makes it difficult to take him to heart. In the title story, for instance, a young, play-by-wits Jewish immigrant (from "Plotsadika-Chotchki") comes to New York in the early part of the century and immediately begins whirling through adventures that involve road crews, Hasidim, anarchists, and a beautiful young seamstress—and though the story ingratiates with its bounce, it disqualifies itself from seriousness with its relentless puppetry of characters and its dubious apothgems ("Everyone was in love with freedom, and it is one abstract quality which, somehow or other, always manages to love you back"). Finally, then: a collection of spun-sugar stories, artfully done but awfully fragile.