Long Island Compromise
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Random House, 464 pp.
“They were the shining realization of the Jewish American dream, people who could load their plates with all that this country had to offer.” These are the Fletchers in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s rollicking, unsettling new novel Long Island Compromise. Zelig Fletcher makes his fortune in polystyrene and with his wife Phyllis establishes a family compound on Long Island Sound. Son Carl takes over the factory and, with his wife Ruth, raises two sons and a daughter. The novel focuses on these three. Nathan, a lawyer, marries Alyssa and raises twins, Ari and Josh. Bernard, known as Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, weds Noelle, who names their children Liesl and Wolfgang. And Jenny, the smartest and guiltiest of the bunch, is giving away her money as fast as she can. The siblings want for nothing—but they are marked forever by a dark event nobody talks about. In 1980, their father was kidnapped. Ransomed for $250,000, Carl returned, and everything was “mostly fine,” except that this trauma changes everything.
Decades later, the Fletcher children are still struggling. Nathan suffers from acute anxiety and buys insurance compulsively. Pill-popping Beamer leads an exhausting and expensive secret life.
Jenny lives alone, racking up 300,000 points in a video game called Mogul. Long Island Compromise takes the reader on a bouncy ride, from Beamer’s dominatrix in Encino to Jenny’s protests in New Haven to Phyllis’s moldering estate with its cracked tennis court and dilapidated statues on the lawn. Some events are far-fetched, but rich detail and pitch-perfect dialogue bring the novel down to earth. Phyllis hears her granddaughter’s name and insists that Liesl is the “oldest daughter of the Nazi in The Sound of Music.” Her daughter-in-law Ruth, who is militantly secular (of course) after being raised Orthodox, declares, “We’re Jews who eat bacon.” Called home to see her sick grandmother, Jenny is busy with a protest. Voice rising passive-aggressively, she explains, “It’s actually a hunger strike?”
We laugh at them; we feel for them too.
The narrator’s laconic voice is at once gossipy—“Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?”—mock-biblical—“and lo did the baby Carl grow to a man”—and judgmental—“The Fletcher children had not been immune to the inertia of all rich kids, which was to lack the imagination that the money could ever possibly stop coming in.” Yes, the narrator enjoys a little schadenfreude and invites us to indulge as well.
Brodesser-Akner is a born satirist, and her tale of the Fletchers is deliciously funny. It is also sad. Delve into this uproarious story and you find that Carl’s children hate themselves. Each seeks harm and gives up agency. Nathan entrusts his fortune to his childhood friend and bully, the boy from whom he’d always “sought approbation and approval, without asking why.” Beamer hires a woman to whip and abuse him every Thursday. Jenny is paralyzed by shame.
Why do the Fletchers punish themselves? Well, why does Carl watch Holocaust movies over and over? Because he was abducted and survived. Because his family thrives while others have been lost. Because the Fletchers’ good fortune seems like luck, no longer something they have earned. Because even now when they are safe in America, Jews don’t trust that safety—and deep down they don’t think they deserve it. “Sigmund Freud over here,” as Ruth would say.
These characters could be caricatures. Their excesses are cartoonish, their actions madcap, manic—but they know that. The siblings are smart and self-aware, and they realize they have got to change. A financial crisis brings about this reckoning, but the fallout is spiritual and emotional as well as monetary. Shaken up and shaken down, the Fletchers realize their lives are unsustainable.
The question is this: Spoiled as they are, self-loathing as they have become, are these people capable of starting fresh, or finding meaning?
The novel teases that it’s possible. We glimpse expressions of wistfulness and love. “She had been so beautiful when they’d first met,” Beamer muses, remembering his wife Noelle before she started injecting her face with “neurotoxins.” “God, why am I crying?” Alyssa asks, after her niece plays the flute. Liesl casts a spell over the whole family so that “the room was seized by a giant mood shift, a quiet, a surrender.” Beamer’s reaction is perfectly expressed. He “tried not to look at Liesl too directly, lest he love her too hard.” However, such moments are rare. Brodesser-Akner keeps the engine running and the snappy lines coming as if to reassure us: Don’t worry, this novel won’t turn to mush.
Like the young Philip Roth in Goodbye, Columbus, Brodesser-Akner is tart, smart and irreverent. Like Jean Hanff Korelitz in The Latecomer, she writes brilliantly about Jewish American successes and excesses. This book has its lineage in television too. “There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age,” the narrator announces in words reminiscent of Seinfeld’s dictum, “No hugs, no learning.” And yet the Fletchers long to connect, and sometimes they want to learn. Broken as they are, they harbor regrets, feel pain, experience beauty. We laugh at them; we feel for them too—and we keep reading, hoping for a resolution. Crowded with incident, Long Island Compromise is a novel of character. Bawdy and self-mocking, the novel is also a morality tale about the American Dream’s side effects. If the Fletchers appear shallow, their mishigas runs deep. They might be irredeemable; they are human, nonetheless.
Allegra Goodman’s books include Sam, The Cookbook Collector and The Family Markowitz. Her new novel Isola will be published in January 2025.
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