[Wasserburg teaches writing at Northwestern University and has published poems, essays, and reviews in various publications. In the following review, he discusses the implications of Henkin's light touch in Swimming Across the Hudson.]

"If a Jew forgets he is a Jew," writes Bernard Malamud, "a gentile will remind him." In the case of Ben Suskind, the narrator of Joshua Henkin's first novel, that gentile is his birth mother. Swimming Across the Hudson tells the story of Ben, his brother Jonathan, and Ben's girlfriend, Jenny. Ben and Jonathan, the products of different parents, have both been adopted by a scholarly Jewish couple in Manhattan who have raised them according to Jewish law. The brothers (who know nothing of their birth parents) have been bar mitzvahed; they enjoyed celebrating the Sabbath while growing up; they deeply love their adoptive parents; and then, not surprisingly, as young men they drift from their upbringing.

After the brothers move to San Francisco, Ben moves in with the non-Jewish Jenny and her daughter from a previous marriage and begins teaching high school history. Jonathan, who comes out as gay during college, establishes himself as a gerontologist and begins a happy life with his lover, Sandy. But when Ben receives a letter from his birth mother, his casual acceptance of his life begins unraveling.

Henkin describes Ben's meeting with his mother with humor and pathos. After an uncomfortable exchange about how long she is staying in town, Ben realizes that he wishes she would uproot her life for him, but then becomes panicked at the thought. "It would be like a first date. You had just met, and the girl was already saying she wanted you to meet her parents." But the meeting is less troubling than the fallout it causes in Ben's personal life. With his gentile roots exposed, Ben suddenly feels the need to assert his Judaism. When he nails up a mezuza next to the door of his and Jenny's apartment, Jenny tolerates it because of her curiosity about Ben's upbringing. She listens as Ben explains that the mezuza symbolizes the protection granted by God to a Jewish home, but then tartly reminds him: "Except this isn't a Jewish home. Only one of us is Jewish."

In many first American novels, questions of identity become the province solely of the family. But Swimming Across the Hudson does more than simply follow a young person into adulthood as he breaks from and then reconciles with his family. It is one of the book's clear but subtle ironies that Ben teaches history to teenagers. Even as he struggles to make the past relevant—read "personal"—to his self-absorbed students, Ben tries reconciling the two intersecting paths of his own past. By trying to make the distant past matter to his students, he is trying to pull them into adulthood, just as Henkin's novel, by tackling themes larger than Mom and Pop, pulls itself into a literary adulthood avoided by so many first American novels.

Because Swimming Across the Hudson examines the domestic world through the lens of the historical—Judaism is, if nothing else, a profoundly historical religion—Ben's routine family interactions after his discovery that his birth mother isn't Jewish begin to radiate a strange, discomfiting sense of displacement. Ben has a new identity now as both insider and alien, a kind of double agent in the Jewish and gentile worlds.

Ben is an understated and scrupulous narrator, with a winning combination of earnestness and decorum. It is a relief to find a novel by someone younger than 40 that doesn't opt for the soulless ironies of Postmodernism because it fears sentimentality. While the comic potential of a Jewish man meeting his ultra-shiksa mother might have seemed tempting to exploit, Henkin never plays for easy laughs. Instead, his subdued sense of humor permeates the novel, leavening the seriousness of his subject.

This light touch also proves a liability, however. Occasionally the narrative voice seems to skate over important information, perhaps because Henkin wanted to avoid stating the obvious. In fact, he leaves a number of matters unresolved, and the last one-third of the novel stumbles toward its conclusion. In his obsession to uncover the past. Ben poses as Jonathan and makes a secret trip to Chicago to meet his brother's biological mother. The ruse works too well. Thinking she is addressing Jonathan, the woman discloses a haunting piece of intelligence about "your brother," i.e., Ben. Yet surprisingly, Ben seems more concerned that Jonathan and Jenny will uncover his fakery than he is with examining the implications of his discovery.

One senses that by cracking open such a complex subject, Henkin had difficulty neatly resolving everything. The novel's compelling lyricism begins to stagger under the weight of the various traumas, real and potential, that appear toward the end. But Swimming Across the Hudson suggests Henkin has what we might call good literary capital: He has an inherently interesting story to tell, and ample resources with which to examine it.