Andrew Ridker’s second novel, ‘Hope’: A review

But while “Hope” shares its name with a “snappy acronym” and a punchy slogan, it is so named because it is what the Greenspans — Scott, his wife, Deb, and their children, Maya and Gideon — cling to when their tight family unit breaks down and falls apart. The result is a series of absorbing portraits of compellingly flawed individuals, and a vivid depiction of modern American life.

Ridker packs a lot into “Hope.” The book unfolds through sections devoted to each family member, beginning with Scott, a successful 53-year-old cardiologist whose fortunes change when he loses a considerable amount of money on an investment. Unable to secure a place at an expensive retirement home for his mother, Marjorie, he resorts to desperate measures by falsifying blood samples — an act which wrecks the HOPE trial, torpedoes his career and destroys his marriage.

Maya is struggling to make her mark as a young assistant at a New York publishing house. A chance encounter with William, the high school English teacher she was infatuated with at the age of 17, rekindles old emotions. She makes plans to see him — just moments before her boyfriend proposes marriage — and soon embarks on another illicit relationship. But what are William’s motives this time around?

After splitting from Scott, Deb finds romance with Joan, the founder of a network of charter schools, and throws herself into her latest project for her synagogue’s Resettlement Committee. But her equilibrium is shattered by her son’s bombshell that he has broken up with his girlfriend and dropped out of Columbia. Gideon’s section sees him traveling to Israel on a Birthright trip. Instead of finding himself in this promised land, he heads off the beaten track on a quite different, and far more dangerous, mission of self-discovery.

In places, the novel feels too busy for its own good, with these characters’ detailed biographies and backstories clogging the narrative and stymieing momentum. And some of the imagery is clunky: “He was tired of hiding beneath the bed of Experience”; “She didn’t want to invite the bull of her affair into the china shop of her career.”

However, when Ridker gets the balance right, the novel is at once propulsive and immersive, powered by one tragicomic episode after another, right up until its final tension-filled paragraph. The four main leads are forceful presences, but so too are certain bit-part players, from Maya’s no-nonsense, go-getting boss, Cressida, to the delightfully maddening Marjorie, a woman “less interested in withdrawing from reality than in stretching it to suit her whims.”

“Hope” has much in common with Ridker’s 2019 debut, “The Altruists,” which also revolved around a Jewish family and sourced its drama from the father’s financial woes. Next time it would be refreshing to see Ridker branch out and cover new ground. A writer with this much talent can take his readers anywhere.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and New Republic.