The King in the Window.(Brief Article)(Children's Review)(Book Review)

The King in the Window ADAM GOPNIK. Hyperion/Miramax, $19.95 (416p) ISBN 0-7868-1862-X

Gopnik's (Paris to the Moon, for adults) first offering for young readers is ambitious, complex and overly long. Oliver Parker, 11, an American boy in Paris, is vaguely unhappy. His father, a correspondent for a New York newspaper, is preoccupied; his French schoolmasters exacting, and his closest friend, Neige, sullen. His boredom ends instantly when, wearing the gold-paper crown he won on Epiphany for finding the prize inside a cake, he is mistaken for the monarch of the title, whose destiny is to free the "wraiths" of Versailles. These spirits, French luminaries including …