SOURCE: "Family Politics," in The New York Times, April 27, 1997, p. 17.

[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...