[In the following review, Garner calls Henkin's Swimming Across the Hudson an "admirable novel," despite its flaws.]

For generations of striving young intellectuals who have gazed longingly at Manhattan from the remove of New Jersey's suburbs, a novel titled Swimming Across the Hudson could be about only one thing: the chilly, Darwinian struggle to make it in the big city. It is one of the nice conceits of Joshua Henkin's wistful first novel that he flips that implied meaning neatly on its head.

Swimming Across the Hudson is about two adopted brothers, raised on the Upper West Side by politically radical Jewish parents, who cross the Hudson in the opposite direction and simply keep going—all the way to San Francisco. They need breathing space not just to escape from these slightly manic parents (who live for picket lines, The New York Review of Books and loathing Rudolph Giuliani) but to ponder the high heap of social issues that this subtle and complex novel raises, including extended inquiries into the nature of Judaism, of homosexuality and of family itself.

For Ben Suskind, the novel's 31-year-old narrator, and his brother, Jonathan, their adoption is the one salient fact of their lives. "When you're adopted, everything's contingent," Ben says. "All roads are mired with offshoots; you always see the path not taken. No wonder I studied philosophy in college, all those counterfactuals piled on each other. What if? What if? What if?" Once Ben moves to San Francisco, where he teaches high school, those scattered "what if's?" begin narrowing into thorny realities. He is contacted by his birth mother, who stuns him with the news that he was not born a Jew; his brother announces that he is gay; to the dismay of his Orthodox parents, Ben drifts from Judaism and falls in love with a shiksa.

It is to Mr. Henkin's credit that he juggles these multiple quandaries with grace, and that each of them neatly feeds Ben's overarching contemplation of his shifting sense of identity. It helps, too, that Mr. Henkin is such a deft and fluid writer. His clear, evocative prose allows small moments to build to surprisingly potent emotional payoffs. For example, when Ben meets his birth mother for the first time, they are unable to decide on a restaurant, and Mr. Henkin lets the details of their uncomfortable afternoon speak for themselves:

We walked up the street toward campus. We passed salad bars, taquerias, sandwich shops and pizza joints. We stopped in front of the restaurants and glanced at the menus, but at each place something else seemed slightly wrong. We were dancing around each other: You choose; no, you choose. We really must have looked as if we were on a first date, all elbows and knees as we walked up the street, unable to find the right distance between us, several times almost colliding with each other.

Mr. Henkin concludes this scene beautifully, with Ben forced to confront the one question he had not anticipated: "What could be worse than being bored by your own birth mother?"

Swimming Across the Hudson does have some fairly serious problems. The quietness of Mr. Henkin's prose can occasionally border on the anemic—this is a book that could have used a bit more passion, more sex, more mess. Mr. Henkin is also attracted to sentimental clichés ("There was something about airports that made me sad"), a trait that gives too many scenes a goopy, underdeveloped quality. Worse, he tacks on an ending, in which Ben rather wildly goes looking for his brother's birth mother, that seems forced and false.

Yet you finish Swimming Across the Hudson feeling grateful for Mr. Henkin's poise and seriousness of purpose—particularly in an era in which so many talented young writers arc content to play "Can You Top This?" with snide, hurdy-gurdy irony. Mr. Henkin's young narrator grew up abiding his parents' simple rule: "You love your family; you stand on the picket line for the rest of the world." His lesson, at the close of this admirable novel, is that family and politics can indeed be pried apart—but only at tremendous cost.