Jeanette Winterson’s new novel, “Lighthousekeeping” (Harcourt, 232 pages, $23), is at first glance a salty yarn. “My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate,” begins the narrator, an orphan in northern Scotland. Silver, like many of Ms. Winterson’s protagonists, is practically androgynous, though she eventually discloses that she is a woman.

Silver is not alone in having an overdetermined name. After her mother dies, she passes to Miss Pinch, a loveless old maid, and then to Pew, a light housekeeper who is both attentive and a daydreamer. Pew is blind; he loves to tell stories about Babel Dark, a local legend who was intimately connected to the lighthouse tower where Silver now lives.

Lighthouses themselves are innately symbolic, and Ms. Winterson happily avoids the most obvious, phallic, connotation. For her, lighthouses are beacons, and in turn, become the stories sailors tell about each light. “Every light had a story – no every light was a story,” decides Pew, “and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.”

Ms. Winterson has a summarizing mind, and much of “Lighthousekeeping” riffs on the schematic, and basically magical, plot that binds Silver, Dark, and Pew: “My life. His life. Pew. Babel Dark. All of us bound together, tidal, moon-drawn, past, present and future in the break of a wave.” It appears that Dark, a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure who secretly sires a blind orphan, is the forefather of both Silver and Pew, at least in a Joseph Cambellian sense. Pew never quite says as much, but Ms. Winterson piles on the lyrical hints.

The tension between an unknowable plot and its redundant elaboration sparks many of Ms. Winterson’s novels. In “Lighthousekeeping,” Pew tells the story of the McCloud, a scuttled brig that returns, in name only, as a modern, computer-controlled vessel. “On the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.”

Ms. Winterson’s love of double-exposures – of image, lifeline, and squarerigger – is thus allied with the messiness of life, insofar as that messiness creates opportunities for love: Love becomes Silver’s faux-naif obsession. At the end of the novel, though, she can only conclude with this: “These were my stories – flashes across time.” In “Lighthousekeeping,” storytelling is more idea than practice.

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Before you call Jeanette Winterson pretentious, look at what’s on the bestseller list. Alice Hoffman, a more popular writer, leans even more heavily on ideas than Ms. Winterson. The problem is that Ms. Hoffman’s ideas are plucked from thin air.

Ms. Hoffman’s trademark conceit is literalism – in one book, a character could literally smell a lie. In “The Ice Queen” (Little, Brown, 211 pages, $23.95), the protagonist is not only aloof, but actually cold, until she is struck by lightning. Then she falls in love with another lightning victim, who is burning hot. To suffer his kisses, she first swallows ice. This is magical realism with a shrug.

Ms. Hoffman’s fingerprints are everywhere. As a child, the protagonist wished her mother would die, and she did. Then the daughter cut off her hair: “My grandmother called what I’d done to my hair a pixie cut, but could she give a name to what I’d done to my mother?”

Ms. Hoffman employs abstract analogies that would only occur to a writer to further her plot. Later, chaos theory becomes the ultimate theme in this overcrowded book.

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In his new book, Gilbert Sorrentino quotes Celine: “every virtue has its contemptible literature.” That intelligence might be such a virtue is no surprise to Mr. Sorrentino, who in the 53 pseudo-reviews that comprise “Lunar Follies” (Coffee House Press, 143 pages, $14) flaunts the excesses of contemporary art and its criticism.

Mr. Sorrentino’s sarcasm has legs, and he gains momentum from back-and-forth qualifications. “Ors” abound: “The place or space or venue is rife or blossoming with pictures or photographs.”

He pretends to give things a chance, when really he is only giving them more rope. No matter how bad Mr. Sorrentino makes the critic seem, the nonexistent art described shines through with some interest. And when named artists suffer, it is their audience who really gets the boot.

Mr. Sorrentino’s real quarry is not art, but writing. Mr. Sorrentino himself well knows the marginalization of excellence – in writing, in his case – and when he writes that “High upon a wall, quite near the ceiling, a large thing, colored a strangely glowing puce, abuts a frosty moon,” he seems to dare us to join him on that large thing, and, with him, be called puce.