FICTION Long Island Compromise Taffy Brodesser-Akner Wildfire, $32.99 “Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” So begins Long Island Compromise, a sprawling, generation-spanning novel that starts with a family tragedy, then blooms across the decades following. The Fletchers are the family in question: a wealthy Jewish-American bunch whose patriarch, Styrofoam factory owner Carl, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning in 1980, then brutalised and held for ransom.
When he is safely returned, the family sweeps it under the rug and pretends it didn’t happen – but of course, intergenerational trauma doesn’t quite work that way. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel has plenty to say about wealth, family and community, some of it astute. Credit: AP Literary fiction readers will be familiar with Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s observational prose, zippy dialogue and acerbic, dark sense of humour.
The author’s first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble , dissected a crumbling marriage from three very different perspectives. It was one of the most buzzy fiction debuts of 2019, and was later made into a television show, also written and executive produced by the author ( Long Island Compromise will be adapted for screen by Apple TV). Fleishman , and Brodesser-Akner’s celebrity profiles for The New York Times (the one on Gwyneth Paltrow is a hoot), cemented her as a clear-eyed writer with quick, wicked wit and sharp insights into all the shades of what makes us human.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel is full of insufferable people who are difficult to empathise with. These signature aspects of Brodesser-Akner’s writing are present in her latest novel, but its scope, and ambition, are much larger – this is a dysfunctional family story in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s door-stoppers or, on screen, Succession and The Royal Tenenbaums . We get to know each character via hefty, winding sections from their perspectives (albeit at a third-person remove): Carl and his wife Ruth, and their children Beamer (a horny screenwriter born Bernard – the title of the book is a sly reference to anal sex), Nathan (an anxious, hypochondriac lawyer) and Jenny (born after the kidnapping, she’s trying to disavow the family’s wealth by organising unions and doing social good – she is perhaps the only Fletcher with a real conscience).
These are rich, awful people doing rich, awful things; the fact that the shadow of the tragedy is never far explains, but hardly excuses their neurotic, often deplorable behaviour. The family’s plight draws sympathy, but the individuals largely do not – perhaps this is the point Brodesser-Akner is making, but these insufferable people are difficult to truly empathise with, even when their complicated family history becomes more evident. Staying with these unlikeable characters for close to 450 pages is monumentally challenging.
These are invented characters, but the catalyst for their story has some grounding in reality. Carl’s kidnapping is based loosely on the real-life kidnapping of Jack Teich, a wealthy businessman who was abducted from his New York driveway in 1974 and held for what was then the largest ransom in the US. It’s an interesting titbit to consider particularly in the context of one plot point, in which Beamer bristles when his former writing partner finds success in using the Fletchers’ family tragedy as the basis for a hit television show.
The question of ethics lingers over that fiction and this one. Though Brodesser-Akner was given the family’s blessing to use their story as a springboard for Long Island Compromise , there’s a nagging sense of hypocrisy. Loading The novel has plenty to say about wealth, family and community, some of it astute – Brodesser-Akner’s understanding and exploration of inherited trauma, in particular, can make for moving and deeply human observations.
At one point, a character nails the intergenerational cycle in a conversation with Jenny, who refuses to believe that something that happened so long ago, and not to her directly, could have an ongoing impact: “I think the condition of trauma as opposed to just something bad happening is the way it repeats on you.” It seems it is the people outside the immediate family unit who understand it the most, though the Fletchers eventually learn to come to grips with what they have been through and all that they have lost – as well as the fact that Carl’s abduction was just one part of generations of traumas, both small and big. The issue is that it takes too long to get there, through detours that are stacked with often superfluous detail.
The author’s meticulous, almost forensic eye for specifics – presumably a habit of her journalistic pursuits – bogs the narrative down; despite the breathless pace of the writing and dialogue, the story development can often feel sluggish. With the final line, a sigh of relief: “The Fletchers were gone for good now, and we never had to hear their terrible name again.” The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.
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