SOURCE: "A Trip to Self-Discovery and Back to One's Roots," in Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1998, p. E6.

[In the following review, Kirsch lauds the lack of pretension in Henkin's novel of self-discovery, Swimming Across the Hudson.]

Dylan Thomas once poked fun at audacious young writers by characterizing the typical first novel as an account of pain, passion, wisdom and experience "catastrophically gained by the age of 19."

To the credit of debut novelist Joshua Henkin, however, no such pretensions are displayed in Swimming Across the Hudson. Rather, the author muses gently over the understated mysteries of life that occur to all of us in reflective moments: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

"I saw myself in everyone," says the narrator of the novel, a young man with acute powers of observation but no real sense of himself, "and everyone in me."

The voice...