FICTION
Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Wildfire, $32.99
“Would you like to hear a story with a terrible ending?” This is how Long Island Compromise, a sprawling, generational novel that begins with a family tragedy and unfolds over the following decades.
The Fletchers are the family in question: a wealthy Jewish-American family whose patriarch, Styrofoam factory owner Carl, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning in 1980, then brutally beaten and held for ransom. When he returns safely, the family sweeps the matter under the rug and pretends nothing happened – but of course that’s not how intergenerational trauma works.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel has a lot to say about wealth, family and community, some of it clever.Credit: AP
Readers of fiction will be familiar with Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s observational prose, snappy dialogue, and biting, black humor. The author’s first novel, Fleishman is in troubleanalyzed a crumbling marriage from three very different perspectives. It was one of the most sensational fictional debuts of 2019 and was later adapted into a television series, also written and executive produced by the author (Long Island Compromise is adapted for the screen by Apple TV).
Fleischmannand Brodesser-Akner’s celebrity profiles for The New York Times (the one about Gwyneth Paltrow is a hoot) established her as a sharp-eyed writer with quick, wicked wit and keen insights into all facets of what makes us human.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel is full of unbearable people for whom it is difficult to develop sympathy.
These typical aspects of Brodesser-Akner’s writing are present in her latest novel, but its scope and ambition are much larger – this is a story about a dysfunctional family in the style of Jonathan Franzen’s Doorstoppers or, on the screen, Consequence And The Royal Tenenbaums.
We get to know all the characters in extensive, intricate sections from their perspectives (albeit from a third-person distance): Carl and his wife Ruth and their children Beamer (a lecherous screenwriter whose birth name is Bernard—the book’s title is a mischievous reference to anal sex), Nathan (an anxious, hypochondriac lawyer) and Jenny (born after the kidnapping and trying to disown the family’s wealth by forming unions and engaging in social activism—she is perhaps the only Fletcher with a real conscience).
These are rich, terrible people doing rich, terrible things; the fact that the shadow of tragedy is never far away explains their neurotic, often deplorable behavior, but hardly excuses it. The family’s fate inspires sympathy, but the individuals largely do not – perhaps this is the point Brodesser-Akner wants to make, but it is difficult to feel any real sympathy for these insufferable people, even as their complicated family history becomes clearer. Staying true to these unsympathetic characters for nearly 450 pages is an enormous challenge.
