THE ORCHARD
By David Hopen
To 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 student at Torah Temimah, an “academic 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 household than his Torah-thumping father, pushes her son to read secular works to supplement the yeshiva’s unending focus on religious study.
Hopen is a stylish, atmospheric writer whose characters inhabit sensuous tableaus, and the palpable dreariness that lingers over Ari’s solitary Brooklyn childhood is all-encompassing. “I was sick of enduring relentless, Chekhovian boredom, sitting alone in libraries, mourning what I’d never know: torturous love, great voyages, nostos.” Salvation — or at least escape — arrives at the end of Ari’s junior year of high school, when his father loses his accounting job, only to be offered a fresh start in Florida by a shady family connection: an uncle known for “peddling disastrous investments” in, among other things, “a company that sold malfunctioning vacuum cleaners.” (I kept waiting for Hopen to return to this story line, ripe as it is for development, 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 enigmatic 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 seniors who quickly (and mysteriously) 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 replaced by alcohol, drugs, decadent 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 rigorous principal, who begins holding 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 increasingly 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 exist? And if so, can a mortal being unlock the “revelations of this higher world”?
This last conundrum becomes increasingly central to the group’s dynamic, and readers of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” 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 subsumed by long pages of arcane, hyper-intellectual teenage discussions of the kind that make one relieved to be firmly entrenched in adulthood. Indeed, the second half of the novel reads like the literary equivalent of a mood board, stuffed full of overlapping ideas and asides, plots and tangents — part thriller, part religious inquiry, part love story, and part Tarttian 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 knowledge abundant. But one word has eluded him: streamlining.
"Review" - Google News
November 17, 2020 at 05:00PM
https://ift.tt/3lHys0U
Book Review: ‘The Orchard,’ by David Hopen - The New York Times
"Review" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqLwiz
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Book Review: ‘The Orchard,’ by David Hopen - The New York Times"
Post a Comment