SOURCE: A review of Swimming Across the Hudson, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 244, No. 10, March 10, 1997, pp. 50-51.

[In the following review, the critic complains that Henkin's Swimming Across the Hudson "proves only as poignant as a particularly absorbing episode of TV's 'The Real World.'"]

The trials of a small Jewish family whose adopted son re-acquaints himself with his birth mother provide the background for Henkin's debut[, Swimming Across the Hudson]. An understated novel of ideas, it poses in accessible form serious questions about the nature of identity—personal, sexual and, above all else, religious. Ben Suskind, 31, a countercultural high-school teacher, and his gay younger brother. Jonathan, who's a doctor, live in the Bay Area. They were both raised in Manhattan by adoptive parents—a stern Jewish professor at Columbia and his more relaxed wife. Dad has long been at pains to see that his boys don't dilute their...