In his debut novel, the Orchard, David Hopen tells the story of Ari Eden, a seventeen-year-old student at a Modern Orthodox prep school in suburban Florida who falls in with some rebellious classmates. Here, as Michal Leibowitz writes in her review, Ari encounters “a world of opulence, debauchery, and ambition,” complete with “drinking, of course, and drugs and girls.” Hopen adds to this mix a charismatic classmate who entertains Kabbalah-tinged heresies. Leibowitz assesses the book’s strengths, and its weaknesses:
The Orchard is not a particularly subtle book (again, the kid’s name is Ari Eden), and many plot elements stretch the limits of plausibility. Nevertheless, those who spent their formative years at one of our country’s Modern Orthodox day schools will recognize the truth in Hopen’s depiction of Kol Neshama’s school culture. There are the extravagant, very unorthodox birthday celebrations (mixed dancing is the least of it); the often cutthroat, prep-school culture; and that peculiar coexistence of students whose goals for self-improvement range from Try my hardest to believe in the Almighty to Score three goals in a soccer game.
But such nods to realism are utterly outweighed by Hopen’s taste for theatrics, which infuses even the more mundane descriptions of teenage life. It’s not enough for the kids to be bad; they must be really bad, stuff-of-parental-nightmares bad, like when a senior ditch day devolves into a nude pool party, or when Ari’s first-ever alcoholic drink comes laced with a date-rape drug, or when, on winter break in the Florida Keys, members of the group start snorting cocaine. Similarly, Ari’s first encounters with members of the fairer sex aren’t just awkward (as one might reasonably expect after a lifetime of single-sex education), but existentially fraught. . . . There’s Evan’s deeply tragic ex-girlfriend, Sophia Winter, who is wise but cold (get it?), and Kayla Gross, an underdeveloped character whose acceptance to Stern College for Women is the main indication of her purity of heart and mind.
None of this reads particularly well, especially when Hopen tries to elevate the melodrama by putting it in close proximity to philosophy and theology, . . . determined that the novel be bigger than a coming-of-age story or even a losing-my-religion story. . . . Had teasers [about the Talmud and Zohar] eventually filled out into some kind of idea, this book might have managed to pull off its ambitious agenda. But as it is, The Orchard reads more like Days of Our Lives than Daniel Deronda.
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More about: American Jewish literature, American Jewry, Kabbalah, Modern Orthodoxy
