Welcome back to Beach Read Book Club ’s discussion of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. Today, we’re talking about Nathan and his many anxieties. (If you’re new, you can catch up on part one here and part two here .
) Zach Schiffman: Nathan obviously was a very stereotypical neurotic Jewish guy, but I found a lot of the minutia with him really funny. The stuff with him thinking Alyssa’s cheating on him, but it’s just the renovation, was obvious in a way, but then also surprising in little ways. I loved really living in a neurotic Jewish guy and not letting it just be a throwaway character or a joke.
And his neurosis with his family makes perfect sense in a way that’s obvious but satisfying. Emily Gould: I also really appreciated the contrast with Beamer. I thought it was really interesting to contrast someone who probably has a lot of baseline anxiety that he treats with handfuls of drugs, compulsive overeating, and having sex workers shove things up his butt and reenact kidnapping fantasies with someone who has a lot of anxiety and deals with it via ineffective apps and breathing and just taking some Zoloft every day.
Nathan has all of these deep-seated problems and he is determined to tough them out and accommodate them by making his life and his family’s lives as much of a padded cell as possible. Which is actually in a way so much crazier than Beamer, but it looks really functional from the outside. I also thought the land-use stuff and going .