David Plante's second novel ["Slides"] … is full of ghosts from Hawthorne. Elements of "The House of Seven Gables," "The Blithedale Romance," and "The Marble Faun" come in and out of focus throughout the book. For scholars, it could be fascinating (and, perhaps, illuminating) to discover familiar motifs embedded in a romance of the present decade. When the literary detective work is over, "Slides" must be judged for itself, not in the glow of Hawthorne.

The slides of the title may be taken to be the 67 vignettes in which the story is told. They are slides (rather than home movies) because they each focus on one moment of tension that breaks off unresolved, leaving it for us to imagine what happens next….

Such a technique toys with a reader's expectations—but I was intrigued enough to go along with it for a time. However, by the second half of...