[In the following review, Berman lauds the originality and compassion of Henkin's Swimming Across the Hudson.]

At 30, Ben Suskind, a high school teacher of history, is suddenly in the midst of a major identity crisis. His birth mother contacts him: She's left her husband, dropped into San Francisco—from Indiana—to sell her handmade earrings and wants to meet him.

This bare-bones situation, which might initially sound like a TV movie of the week, provides the framework for Swimming Across the Hudson, a first novel by Joshua Henkin that's winning praise for its complexity, gentle humor and sincerity.

For Ben, whose quiet unease about his origins has been an undercurrent in his life, his birth mother's unexpected appearance only raises more questions—about his relationship with his adopted brother, his parents, his Jewishness, his girlfriend Jenny. No aspect of his life seems certain.

If ambivalence and uncertainty are hardly unusual themes for a contemporary novel, Henkin and his narrator Ben manage them in ways that seem original. Even the title offers a humorous twist on the expected: Ben, adopted by an intellectual, politically activist Jewish couple, grows up in Manhattan, wistfully imagining himself escaping to a rawer, more sexually charged existence across the river in New Jersey, the homeland of Bruce Springsteen.

Henkin, who studied the craft of writing fiction as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, writes of familial relationships without cynicism or anger and with wry wisdom, love and compassion.