While the characters of … Ellis Island are hardly of heroic or mythic stature, neither are they likely to be your ordinary bank guard or waitress. They include a bereaved Bavarian photographer, the British captain of an iron-hulled sailing ship in 1909, Israeli soldiers before battle, a lively Jewish immigrant at the turn of the century. Obviously Helprin is unafraid to move about in time and space and nationality. Nor is his style limited to the precise rendering of the mundane. It is often ornate, lavishly rhetorical, "beautiful"…. Theoretically, such boldness, such freedom, such eclecticism should be welcome in an epoch of earthbound realism or exhausted experimentation.

Now let us look at the product. The most ambitious of the short stories, "The Schreuderspitze," describes the journey, both physical and spiritual, of an undistinguished burger of Munich…. His goal is the ascent of the seldom-climbed Westgebirgsausläufer of the Schreuderspitze, the...