SOURCE: A review of Swimming Across the Hudson, in Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1997, p. 244.

[In the following review, the critic praises the subject matter of Henkin's Swimming Across the Hudson, but complains that the novel does not do the subject justice.]

Henkin gives an overly self-serious treatment to a potentially engrossing debut about an adopted son coming to terms with Jewish identity and the many varieties of family.

Narrator Ben Suskind and his younger brother Jonathan, both living in San Francisco, have long accepted the fact of their adoption, but that doesn't mean that relations with their Orthodox Jewish parents are smooth. Their father, old-fashioned and scholarly, has yet to accept Jonathan's homosexuality, while their mother clumsily leaves condoms on his bedside table when he visits. Meanwhile, both parents wish that 31-year-old Ben would move east and marry a nice Jewish girl instead of living with Jenny, a public...