One of the things that popular fiction can do well is to work up in its readers a little awe at the horrors that life makes available to us all and then conclude in a way that leaves us feeling rather good: life does work, doesn't it? Judith Guest is a master of just such performances. Admirers of her immensely likable first novel, "Ordinary People," will feel cozily at home with her second ["Second Heaven"]. Again, a damaged adolescent boy stands at the center of her story; again, the extent of his wounds will not be immediately apparent. Again, two adults with problems of their own attempt to save the boy from cooperating in his own destruction….

Guest is not just a popular novelist; she means to bring some art to what she writes, and does. She scrambles her narrative, dividing it among the points of view of...