The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Orchard: A Novel by David Hopen

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

The Orchard: A Novel by David Hopen A Recommended Book From: The New York Times * Good Morning America * Entertainment Weekly * Electric Literature * The New York Post * Alma * The Millions * Book Riot A commanding debut and a poignant coming-of-age story about a devout Jewish high school student whose plunge into the secularized world threatens everything he knows of himself Ari Eden’s life has always been governed by strict rules. In ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, his days are dedicated to intense study and religious rituals, and adolescence feels profoundly lonely. So when his family announces that they are moving to a glitzy Miami suburb, Ari seizes his unexpected chance for reinvention. Enrolling in an opulent Jewish academy, Ari is stunned by his peers’ dizzying wealth, ambition, and shameless pursuit of life’s pleasures. When the academy’s golden boy, Noah, takes Ari under his wing, Ari finds himself entangled in the school’s most exclusive and wayward group. These friends are magnetic and defiant—especially Evan, the brooding genius of the bunch, still living in the shadow of his mother’s death. Influenced by their charismatic rabbi, the group begins testing their religion in unconventional ways. Soon Ari and his friends are pushing moral boundaries and careening toward a perilous future—one in which the traditions of their faith are repurposed to mysterious, tragic ends. Mesmerizing and playful, heartrending and darkly romantic, The Orchard probes the conflicting forces that determine who we become: the heady relationships of youth, the allure of greatness, the doctrines we inherit, and our concealed desires. About David Hopen David Hopen is a student at Yale Law School. Raised in Hollywood, Florida, he earned his master's from the University of Oxford and graduated from Yale College. The Orchard is his debut novel.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to watch the video version. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Go's go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. And also go to facebook.com forward slash The Chris Voss Show. You can see all our groups over there on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. We've got a really brilliant novelist that we're sharing with you today.

And I think you're going to be excited to read his book, check out everything he's doing and all that good stuff. And this episode is brought to you by IFI Audio and their new Neo IDSD. The Neo is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop, music, gaming, and bleeding edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind,

to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. We have a most incredible novelist on the show today. His name is David Andrew Hopin. He is the brilliant author of The Orchard, and he is a first-year student at Yale Law School. He was raised in Hollywood, Florida, and he earned his master's from the University of Oxford and graduated from Yale College, and we're going to be talking about his brilliant

novel today. David, welcome to the show. How are you, my friend? Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here. It's wonderful to have you, and let's talk about your book Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here. It's wonderful to have you. And let's talk about your book and all that good stuff.

This is really cool. This is your very first book you put out. Do you want to hold it up for us to see for those on the Instagram feed there? There you go. It's a really interesting cover, too, and we'll talk about that in a bit. But where can people find more about you and buy the book on the interwebs? Yeah, the book came out about two months ago with Echo Press, HarperCollins. It's available everywhere books are sold,

Amazon, HarperCollins website, Barnes & Nobles, and then a range of independent bookstores that are obviously well worth supporting. I have a website, davidhopin.com, where you can find links to order and more information about the book. There you go, guys. So what motivated you to write the book? My understanding is you spent quite some time developing this book. Yeah, I started writing this book, actually, I was about 17, 18 years old.

I was a senior in high school. And I guess I had about three different strands of interest that propelled me to write the book, which I went on to write mostly as a college student. Firstly, I grew up in modern Orthodox Jewish communities. I attended Yeshiva high schools. And at the time, I felt perplexed and fascinated by the fact that this kind of specific community within American culture was largely neglected. You could see TV shows that covered ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and you can see books that covered things more to the left, but this was a very particular subset within mainstream American culture. And I was curious about why it was not featured really at all, or at least not on its own terms. And I was interested in examining that kind of lifestyle and also using it to propel readers towards thinking about some of the larger questions I was interested in, because these are communities that balance both tradition and, you know, firmly steeped in tradition, but also with a very normal,

modernized, secular involvement. So that was the first strand. The second strand is that I was a high school kid, I was a teenager, and I could recognize even then that the books I enjoyed reading and the things I enjoyed thinking about often took place at that precipice of about when i was a young kid it was haunting and strange and compelling and i wanted to bring those things together and they all these strands combined and uh that's how the book was started there you go now you mentioned the and hopefully i pronounced this correctly the toman yeah can you expand on us for what that is i have a lot of great jewish friends and i love them in fact i say oy vey all the time i hang out with them so much but i'm not sure what that is and so for uh listeners that might not know can you give us a little bit of more insight to that because that's

in the book too yeah the the long and short of it is that the talmud is a collection of commentary on jewish law and so um specifically for Orthodox observant Jewish communities, they follow this very vast collection of writings that do focus on what the actual law is, but more importantly, it focuses on the chaos of thinking about what law is. As a law student now, I enjoy that part of it where it's the answers are important, the solutions are important, but even more critical is the way we reason towards that. And the way we reason towards finding out what these answers are sheds light on what we value. And so that's kind of the long and short of what the Talmud is. It's

a collection of arguments and thought patterns and interesting stories that arise along the way of figuring out what the law is and what we should do. That's a great life lesson right there, really, when you think about it. Yeah. So give us an overview of the book. Tell us about the story and all that good stuff as to what kind of the broad arc of it is about. Yeah, so I mentioned the Talmud. There is a very eerie tale in the Talmud that features four rabbis, supposedly the holiest rabbis of their era, who get together and go on this strange journey into what's mysteriously called an orchard. In the orchard, these rabbis come face to face with God and each leaves irreversibly and fundamentally changed. They each have different reactions. One goes on to perish.

One loses his faith. One goes insane and only the fourth ends up leaving relatively untouched. And so that was a myth that beguiled me and I wanted to set that myth in contemporary terms. And so the story takes place in modern times. It follows this high school senior named Ari Eden, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, New York, and rather abruptly finds himself transplanted to this whole other dazzling alien world in South Florida, where he falls into a new group of friends at a new school. And these students are much more fast paced and much more in touch with contemporary American culture. And along the way, Ari falls into a crowd that is engaging in very, let's call it unconventional and increasingly

dangerous moral experiments. And so the book, in some sense, reimagines that Tom Yiddish story in modern times. And so it's a book of ideas. It thinks a lot about very important questions in faith and the interplay between faith and culture and meaning. But it's also a book that's about coming of age and becoming an adult and falling in love and figuring out where you belong in this world. These are a lot of things that you go through when you're young.

Of course, I think I'm still going through them at 50. I'm still figuring stuff out and having new epiphanies and waking up going. And that's part of the beauty of it. Now that the book's out in the world and seeing uh audiences from all sorts of places reach out and people who are many decades removed from their high school experience can think vividly back on what it was like to grow up and even if this is a particular uh niche or subset of a community they're universal themes everyone remembers what it was like to be that age yeah i i wish i could go back with all the knowledge that I have now and use it.

But even then, I'm not sure that my knowledge library is complete. I mean, like even at 50, I was like, wow. I think one of the challenges of life is you have this wreckage that you leave behind over the years and you go and you can see the patterns after you get older get older and you can go, wow. Yeah. That, that really left a trail there. But, uh, do you find that a lot of people, uh, whether they're Jewish or not really this resonates with them? I do. Uh, that's, that's one of the great rewarding feelings, uh, about being on the other side of the publishing part of this is that people have related to the book and embraced the book in much wider circles than I could have possibly anticipated. As I said, yes, this book does in some ways take place within a specific community, but the themes are universal. The themes are in no way or shape limited to readers who grew up in modern

orthodox communities uh it's just it's just environment one of the best pieces of advice i received early on as a writer was that world building is effective insofar as it's just world building and so if you're going to set characters in a place so that you can catapult them into larger territory that's wonderful whether that's in you know community in south flor, that's wonderful, whether that's in, you know, community in South Florida, that's a Jewish community, or if it's in, you know, wherever it is, medieval times. And so as long as you get there, I think that's, that's the goal of the book. And so in this way, I have felt and been very grateful to think that people have embraced the book who, Jewish or not Jewish, people who are religious or not religious. Basically, I think it's interesting to anybody who wants to think about how to find meaning in their life and how

to go back into that time and think about when did you first fall in love with some of the ideas that go on to pierce your heart and stay for a while, some of those relationships that are monumental. So yeah, I think hopefully it has wide appeal and continues to have wide appeal. Certainly life lessons too. I mean, regardless of where you are in life or what you believe in or do, you know, the life lessons seem to be those things that resonate with everyone. On the cover, you know, the book is called The Orchard. On the cover, is that a burning bush that we see or what what is that on the cover of the book yes so uh to show it up we have um let's say my designer did an amazing job um someone named elizabeth yoffe i'm very grateful for this cover um i've loved seeing how readers

can look at the cover and each come up with different um aspects in it in it. Some have insisted that they see David Hopin in the flames. Some have seen a bull, some have seen all sorts of, uh, interesting, bizarre images. Um, it's a bit of a Rorschach test in that way. Um, what, what is there is that it's, it's, um, it's a, it's a burning fire in the shape of, um, what can be potentially a bush. Um, there are silhouettes of faces in there representing some of the main characters. But some of the fun is having the readers

look at the cover, study it, go on to read the book, and then as they're reading or after they read it, go back and find some other things hidden in there. That's pretty cool. I've got to go look at that cover again now. So what are the characters in the book as the story develops? So the main character, Ari, is this initially quiet and thoughtful person who has an appreciation for the kind of ultra religious upbringing he's had, but also feels very much restricted. He is a voracious reader and hasn't had necessarily the educational

opportunities for which he'd been hoping. And so largely found himself learning about the world through books, but more than that, having some kind of vicarious experience of the world through books. So he would disappear in books and to reemerge on the other end and feel as if something had transformed within him. He had grown up. He had thought about romance and adventure. And so when he does move to Florida, he's hungry. He's hungry for experience. He's hungry for new friends. He's hungry to actualize some of the ideas he's thought about and read about in books. And he falls into a group of friends that's made up of the ringleader of this group is a boy named Evan Stark, who is brilliant and grappling with the tragic loss of his mother. He is someone who is defiant,

but not in the conventional teenage sense of being angry. He's someone who is looking to make sense of the world and piece together some of the losses he's experienced and push at a lot of the pillars of faith that he's been spoon-fed all of his life. You have other characters like Noah Harris, who is Ari's friend in Florida and new neighbor, and he brings him to the fold.

Noah is this athletic phenomenon. He's going to go play basketball at the collegiate level. He's beloved. You have other characters, including a student named Sophia Winter, for whom Ari is head over heels. She is a mysterious and brilliant pianist. And so there's this, in short, collection of friends who are much more sophisticated, much more knowledgeable and much more charismatic and eager to experience the world than Ari's ever known before. He is immediately spellbound by this group,

but does find himself fitting in and finds out once he's arrived, things accelerate. Awesome. How much of this book has you in it? I mean, we all would take our stories from our personal lives, but how much of this came from, you know, your personal experience in your life? How much have you played into this book? Yeah, I find this is everyone's favorite question. For, you know, for natural reason, I think that you're right. I think authors pull from what they know. And I think for on the reader's side, there's a natural and fun impulse to associate. And so insofar as I grew up in South Florida, I attended these kinds of schools.

I absolutely drew from that. I drew from what it was like to go and have a dual curriculum where you would start your day in prayer and move on to Bible studies and then go to, you know, AP European history and then finish the day at basketball practice where you basically had this extraordinarily unique, I don't know, association of different and potentially clashing things all in one world. And it's a bubble. You don't necessarily think that it's odd. You don't think about what it's like until you leave and go off to college. So I drew from that. I drew also from the energy of being involved in a warm, tight knit community and having lifelong friends with whom you grew up. And I also had I mean, I grew up in South Florida. I've never lived anywhere else before that point. But I did initially attend more of a right wing religious school before going to a more modern high school.

So I knew what it was like to transition, albeit in less dramatic terms. But I will say that the more explosive events of the book, as readers will find, are very much fictional. They don't draw from anything that resembles my life. But part of the fun is imagining some of the real things in your life and thinking about what it would look like in story form and how can that move readers into the places you want them to be. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. How, as you were building this out, what, this is your first novel, and you're probably going to go on like most novelists to write more books and and extend beyond that do you do you see uh the characters in this book or this book being a continuum of

like a you know uh book two book three book four or um do you do you see this being a concise compilation here yeah just before we got on this call, I got an email from some woman who asked, can you please write a sequel? You know, those are, those are always heartening messages to see. I am at work on another book. I hope, you know, if I should be so lucky that I can continue writing books. But as of now, no, I think this is a self-contained book, um, as readers will probably find by the end, a lot happens in here. It's, um, pyrotechnical at parts and heartbreaking at parts. Um, but I do think that it's most likely something that might live on more in another medium, you know, if it, you know, add an adaptation more than another book. Uh, but I do think it was an important book. I mean, it's an important book for many reasons.

I think anyone would find their debut novels important, but I have a particularly intimate and grateful relationship with this book, having basically grown up with it and having started in high school or writing it as a college student. I feel like this is kind of my baby and I have a hard time dissociating from the characters

who have lived in my head for so many years um i think it gets easier to say goodbye when you're working on other characters or when you're in your first semester of law school when the book comes out as happened to me uh so you get busy enough that it's easier to say goodbye but yeah it's been it's been a very interesting experience in that regard uh it sounds like. And yet now I noticed you, like you mentioned, you, you just, uh, you're entering law school or, uh, you were in law school at the time and you graduated now. I understand from Yale college. I graduated from Yale college in 2017. Uh, I went on to do a master's program, uh, in England. Um At that point, I had finished the draft of the book, I was

working on revisions. But again, I was that was independent of my coursework. I was working on my dissertation at the time. And when I had free moments, I was working on the book. And now that I'm back in law school, as the book came out, it was kind of a fun full circle moment, because I don't know what it's like to be with this book outside of school in some ways. And, you know, it was cool to have the book come out right before my finals because things were really getting, you know, I was grateful for it. It was a great opportunity and enjoyable, but they're, you know, chaotic. I remember the day it came out, I went from, you know, some book events to people were asking, you're going out for, you know, some kind of party tonight. And I said, well, I have a threehour seminar and then i have a big paper due tonight so it was you know it was a

really cool thing to write it at this time in my life did some of that experience going to college uh have an effect on on how you wrote the book either from you know character development or storyline or from just the writing in and of itself? Yeah, in intense ways. I mean, first and foremost, so I started this book before going to college and it was a passion project. It was something I was excited about and I was always eager to turn to when I had the time, but it wasn't something I was doing primarily as my coursework. It wasn't something I was doing in any kind of like, I was dedicated to it, but I didn't have a routine. Until midway through my collegiate career, I had the

chance to work with Susan Troy, the National Book Award winner who was on faculty. She was taking on a student to work one-on-one with in a tutorial. And so I remember meekly showing her the pages, you know, maybe 100, 150 pages at that point, prehistoric kind of pages. And she was so gracious as a mentor. She's a brilliant writer. And she made me feel as. So at that point, I think there was a shift in focus. And I set out to finish the draft by the time I graduated college. And so in that regard, you know, I think having the experience of writing in college had a large effect on the book. And I think anybody grows as a writer, hopefully, as they continue at it, and you work on your craft. And also some of the themes of the book were enhanced by being in college and taking the classes I was taking. My intellectual and academic interests are very much reflected in the book.

And parts of growing up and becoming more of a solidified human being, I think, are important when you're writing a book, especially writing a book about characters on the verge of adulthood. What do you think a lot of people are going to take away from the book and remember about it? I have seen that people have taken all sorts of different things. I think there is a large focus on finding what it means to think about divinity in modern terms, even in secular terms, to think about what it means to be good, what it means to be worthy and moral. As I've noted in the past, I think that I had no idea what it would be like to publish a book during a pandemic. And one of the things that I've been interesting to observe is that people now have an extra drive to find some kind of new meaning in life. I think people are grappling with the fact that for so long, our daily routines have been distorted and disrupted. And we've seen chaos,

and we've seen some grim phenomenons, politically, medically, and interpersonally at this point. And I think that a book that presents big ideas about life and death and religion and how to find meaning in life and what it really means to be moral and to what extent does that converge or diverge with being a religious person or being someone who goes along with whatever norms are involved in your community. I think those are all the big questions that people enjoy taking out of the book. And I won't shy away from the fact that the book is also very much a fast-paced thriller. There are big moments. I've enjoyed seeing how readers say that even at the times they wanted to look away, they couldn't or couldn't put the book down and how the characters

stay in their head afterwards. So if you're looking for big ideas, I think the book has much to say. And if you're looking for a chance to re-experience or glimpse that delicate, beautiful time of when you're coming of age, I think the book is there for you too. That's awesome. I love what you just said there. You know, this is a great time where we're doing a lot of reassessment. I mean, we've all become mortal and and it's interrupt our daily lives and our and our and our you know kind of where our indispensability of life where we're just like yeah whatever uh what's the worst that could

happen i mean we're we've certainly found that i was approaching i think 400,000 deaths in america um but uh it has given us more time to be introspective, to read, which is great for authors like you. For me, like podcasts, it's been great for more people are listening in and thinking about their lives and what they're doing. And so it's really great. Anything more we should know about you and the book? I think that largely covers it. Without giving away the whole book, you know. As you said you said you know sometimes it's hard to discuss uh some of the particulars about the book for those who haven't read it um yeah gotta keep that mystery otherwise you know people well there's a certain alert there's a certain

alert yeah i have that problem with movies like sometimes i watch the movie and they're like you should go back and read the book and i'm like i just i just got the cliff notes so but there are there are really good uh movies that are really good books that you should go back like fight club was one i i really enjoyed actually reading the book on and just finding out there was so much more and there's probably more books i really should have gone back and and read um that would make more sense but awesome sauce maybe it'll give an option for some sort of book or movie. Yeah, those are interesting opportunities without giving away too much on that front. So that's exciting.

Stay tuned, folks. There you go. Stay tuned. Give us your plugs one more time where we can take that, David, and check you out. Yeah. My debut novel is called The Orchard from Echo Harper Collins. It came out mid-November. It's available anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, independent bookshops. My website is davidhopin.com. I'm on Instagram.

Reviews and coverage of the book are featured on my website or some fun Google plugs away. And yeah, it's been a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me again, Chris. And thanks for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it, David. Um, and I, it, it's an insightful book that people are going to learn from and, uh, definitely a good time. I think we still have, uh, about nine months maybe, or a year before things return to normal. So it's a good time to think about your life, think about your future, think about everything that's going on in life and, and hopefully come out the other end with a greater appreciation of it.

Yeah, there you go. To my audience. Thank you for tuning in. Go to youtube.com fortress, Chris Voss, go to goodreads.com fortress, Chris Voss, go to facebook.com fortress, the Chris Voss show. There's lots of groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can join as well. Just search for the Chris Voss show. There's also groups on Facebook and LinkedIn you can join as well. Just search for the Chris Foss Show. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Thanks, Dave, for being here. And we'll see you guys next time.