When asked in a recent interview about his legacy as a movie director, Woody Allen replied that his work, despite the praise and respect it has received, has had little direct influence on younger filmmakers. His style hasn’t garnered disciples, he said, in the way that Scorsese’s or Coppola’s has.

In the CanLit realm, Leonard Cohen is a bit like that: his writing is widely recognized as seminal, but unlike Munro’s or Ondaatje’s, it hasn’t produced many clearly identifiable offspring. (Cohen’s music, of course, is a different story.)

Stephen Marche’s debut novel, bearing all the hallmarks of Cohen’s influence – poetic language, urban hipsterism, explicit sexuality, Jewish philosophy – is a rare creature, then. And judging by the book’s many strengths, it’s perhaps a loss to our literature that more younger writers haven’t followed in Mr. Cohen’s footsteps.

Raymond and Hannah is a slim book, with a deceptively simple story to match. Raymond, a twentysomething graduate student, meets Hannah at a Toronto party. She propositions him, and the two catch a cab back to her place. There ensues an uninterrupted week of highly enthusiastic and acrobatic sex, punctuated by occasional breaks for food and booze. Then, on the following Saturday, Hannah, as per previous plans, moves to Jerusalem. She is to study Torah at an orthodox yeshiva for nine months, hoping to understand and reconnect with her roots.

They vow to keep in touch (sigh – e-mail is so unsexy), and naturally there are tests. Raymond, Cohenesque in his appetites, is soon tempted by a luscious teenage violinist in a red dress. Hannah, meanwhile, is immersing herself in orthodox culture, adopting her peers’ view that Jews should avoid relationships with non-Jews. The relationship seems destined to end as a footnote.

What a minefield. It’s almost as if, in a show of youthful virility, the 28-year-old Marche wants to take on every possible bête noire of the first-time novelist and beat it into submission. There’s his use of the clichéd boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl plot, wherein the boy and girl each represent an opposing value system. There’s all that sex – not exactly a strong suit for Canadian authors. In the secular rationalism vs. religious orthodoxy dichotomy that Raymond and Hannah represent, there’s the impossibly grand political theme. And finally, there’s the spectre of that peculiar jingoism of Canadian urban elites – the “look at us, aren’t we so much more multicultural and sophisticated and progressive than everybody else in the world” syndrome.

Raymond is a metrosexual grad student in a stylishly esoteric field – variations among 17th-century editions of Robert Burton’s gargantuan Anatomy of Melancholy. Hannah is a member of a historically oppressed ethnic group, though her wealthy family has no trouble underwriting an expensive year abroad among expat Yalies and Princetonians.

Because of all this, I was expecting the story to self-destruct on every page. Somehow it never does. Strong prose is one factor. Marche’s writing is both muscularly clear and infused with powerful poetic rhythms. One particularly neat device, appropriate to the literary and scriptural milieux, is his use of marginal mini-commentaries that spell out the gist of each subsection of the story. (The book’s wide margins have a second, rather more prosaic, function: they add more pages to a text that is closer to a novella than a novel in length.)

There are some gorgeous images in the novel, such as an evocative recurring flashback to Hannah’s apartment after her furniture has been moved out, bright sunlight streaming in through skylights representing … freedom? Emptiness? Hope?

Marche’s often sly sense of humour helps to undercut any latent pretentiousness in his material. For instance, while the author clearly venerates serious scholarship, he simultaneously, and with great gusto, mocks the absurdities of academia. He does a particularly funny number on Raymond’s supervisor, an uninterested, sartorially challenged WASP known by everyone as “Crazy Jane.” Sexual passages throughout the book are elevated by exuberant wit – in contrast to the embarrassing (and embarrassed) humourlessness of most Canadian writing on the subject.

Finally, there’s real maturity in Marche’s convincing portrayal of radically different systems of belief. He goes so far as to include both convincingly heartfelt passages of deep religious reflection and passionate atheist critiques of religion’s very foundations.

I suspect Marche ultimately feels more sympathy with Raymond’s secularism than Hannah’s emerging orthodoxy. On the other hand, there’s the powerful scene near the book’s climax when Raymond, visiting Hannah in Jerusalem, calls her a racist after she rejects him for not being Jewish. Her reply is devastating, and bravely written: “I’m thinking of my future, and I want Jewish fucking babies, a husband who understands Torah and, say, the Holocaust. It’s my life, and you want to paint me like I’m some fucking settler.”

Raymond and Hannah is a young man’s book, and very much a first novel, with the usual first-novel issues. There are a few too many episodes of passionate debate, of quietly heartfelt weeping. But the talent is unmistakable, and the approach, while not unprecedented, is refreshing. Given trends in CanLit over the past couple of decades, Raymond and Hannah feels like a much-needed roll in the hay after a long, demoralizing dry spell.