THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 21TO BE TRANSPORTED,wholesale,
into a new and unfamiliar world is
one of literature’s great gifts, and
the opening pages of David
Hopen’s ambitious debut novel,
“The Orchard,” promise exactly
that. The world in question is a
strict Orthodox Jewish enclave in
Borough Park, Brooklyn, and our
narrator is one Aryeh (Ari) Eden,
the only intellectually curious stu-
dent at Torah Temimah, an “aca-
demic travesty” of a yeshiva full
of Yiddish-speaking rabbis who
“refused to teach anything
vaguely related to evolution.”
Ari’s educational savior is his
mother, who, having grown up in a
less rigorously traditional house-
hold than his Torah-thumping fa-
ther, pushes her son to read secu-
lar works to supplement the ye-
shiva’s unending focus on reli-
gious study.
Hopen is a stylish, atmospheric
writer whose characters inhabit
sensuous tableaus, and the palpa-
ble dreariness that lingers over
Ari’s solitary Brooklyn childhood
is all-encompassing. “I was sick of
enduring relentless, Chekhovian
boredom, sitting alone in librar-
ies, mourning what I’d never
know: torturous love, great voy-
ages, nostos.” Salvation — or at
least escape — arrives at the end
of Ari’s junior year of high school,
when his father loses his account-
ing job, only to be offered a fresh
start in Florida by a shady family
connection: an uncle known for
“peddling disastrous invest-
ments” in, among other things, “a
company that sold malfunction-
ing vacuum cleaners.” (I kept
waiting for Hopen to return to this
story line, ripe as it is for develop-
ment, but he barely mentions it
again.)
The fictional Zion Hills is a
wealthy Jewish suburb of Miami,
where mansions have Olympic-
size swimming pools, and — as
Evan Stark, a brilliant but enig-
matic classmate at Ari’s new (and
far more lax) “modern Orthodox”
academy, tells him — “everyone
has a Chagall.” Evan is part of a
wealthy clique of fast-living sen-
iors who quickly (and mysteri-
ously) accept Ari as one of their
own. “I overheard whispers in the
halls, noticed faculty members
gawking at the sight of the poorly
dressed, wildly self-conscious
Brooklyn expatriate climbing into
extravagant cars,” Ari narrates,
as his former life — of books and
prayer and hushed family dinners
— begins to slip away, to be re-
placed by alcohol, drugs, dec-
adent parties and the first painful
pangs of young love.
But Ari’s tale of innocence lost
is a mere jumping-off point for
Hopen’s novel, which turns to
life’s deeper questions with the
help of Rabbi Bloom, the school’s
charismatic, intellectually rig-
orous principal, who begins hold-
ing secret salon-like gatherings
with Ari, Evan and two other boys
(Hopen’s female characters tend
toward the archetypical, and have
a bad habit of appearing only
when the plot turns to romance).The rigorous discussions —
which blend poetry, literature,
philosophy and a too-heavy dose
of the Torah — become increas-
ingly intense with each passing
month, as the boys debate classic
questions of faith and suffering,
guilt and tragedy. What’s the
meaning of death? Does God ex-
ist? And if so, can a mortal being
unlock the “revelations of this
higher world”?THIS LAST CONUNDRUMbecomes
increasingly central to the
group’s dynamic, and readers of
Donna Tartt’s “The Secret His-
tory” will recognize the plot
points fast approaching, as
events take a dark, foreboding,
potentially murderous turn (and
no, that’s not a spoiler).
By this point, “The Orchard”
has entered shakier territory, as
Ari’s once-engaging story line —
steeped in very real questions of
morality and devotion — is sub-
sumed by long pages of arcane,
hyper-intellectual teenage dis-
cussions of the kind that make one
relieved to be firmly entrenched
in adulthood. Indeed, the second
half of the novel reads like the lit-
erary equivalent of a mood board,
stuffed full of overlapping ideas
and asides, plots and tangents —
part thriller, part religious inqui-
ry, part love story, and part Tart-
tian homage. Hopen packs in so
much that “The Orchard,” which
began as heightened realism,
soon pushes well beyond the
point of plausibility. Perhaps,
then, it is a story about faith after
all. And the lesson, for a writer
like Hopen, would be not to lose it.
His talent is evident, his knowl-
edge abundant. But one word has
eluded him: streamlining. 0Boychick in the Hood
A young man moves to Miami from Brooklyn and gets an education.
By DAVID GOODWILLIE
THE ORCHARD
By David Hopen
480 pp. Ecco. $27.99.
DAVID GOODWILLIE’Smost recent novel
is “Kings County.”
LINDA MERAD