Long Island Compromise — rich, stylish, moving and funny

Carl Fletcher is a successful businessman, a factory owner, living with his wife Ruth and their two sons, Nathan and Bernard, on their big estate on Long Island. Their house and its surrounding acres, its pool and guesthouse, are jewels set in the kind of suburb that the children of immigrants aspire to live in. Such places, with their endlessly mown lawns and well-maintained fences, are signifiers of safety. No one can take this away from us, they say.

Except, of course, they can. On a spring day in 1980, Carl heads out of the door, climbs into his Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham — Taffy Brodesser-Akner is brilliant on the material details of the Fletchers’ lives; the two boys are eating the now-discontinued Product 19 cereal as their father leaves the house — and is kidnapped and held for ransom. It’s a shocking, effective start to a story. 

Long Island Compromise — the source of the novel’s title is too good to give away — is an examination of suffering’s long tail: what can be kept at a distance and what cannot. What money can protect you from, and where wealth leaves you vulnerable. In Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, made into an engaging TV drama starring Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes, she proved herself an astute of observer of a certain kind of American life — comfortably off, Jewish, urban and suburban, mostly East Coast, beset by the anxieties that prosperity brings.

When Carl is eventually found, the Fletchers determine to put this ordeal behind them. At Long Island Jewish hospital, where Carl is taken to begin his recovery, his mother Phyllis sees her grown son begin to weep, and will have none of it. “Listen to me, boychick,” she tells him. “This happened to your body. This didn’t happen to you. Don’t let it in.”

An impossible goal, as the novel goes on to prove. After this bravura start, Brodesser-Akner skips decades ahead to assess the crime’s enduring effect on the family. There is Bernard (known as Beamer), the younger son, grown into a once-successful Hollywood screenwriter obsessed, to his professional detriment, with the subject of kidnapping; his choice of wife, Noelle — no prizes for guessing she’s not Jewish — is an ongoing source of dismay to his mother and grandmother. Nathan is a lawyer in an ostensibly happy marriage to Alyssa; but their marriage, and his career, are thrown off kilter by his deep-seated neurotic anxiety, his need to assess every risk, no matter how remote. Younger sister Jenny, born after Carl’s ordeal, seems less damaged, but is distant from the family, not least because she becomes a union organiser, stridently leftwing, standing against the capitalist ethos that has built their family’s fortune.

Or has it? For as the novel moves from the 1980s and into the 21st century, the structures of finance and industry change inexorably, cutting away at what the Fletchers have constructed. Environmental standards change: the family business produces styrofoam, the poisonous elements from which it is composed leaching into groundwater and earth, riches and destruction inexorably intertwined. Brodesser-Akner’s narrator is smoothly omniscient, a voice that understands the Fletchers’ world in its entirety: “Now, the Fletchers were not preternaturally rich. They were just regular rich, or the richest people we knew.” The business strategies are cautious, caution that comes from a history the narrative reveals as it stretches back to the horror of the Holocaust from which Carl’s father Zelig miraculously escaped. The nature of that miracle, its detonation across generations, is revealed by the author with elegant and devastating economy.

This is a rich, stylish, moving and funny novel that considers, through the story of a single family, the experience of Jewish trauma and what it meant for refugees from the inexorable exterminating force of Nazism to try to make new lives — and what it still means, every second of every day. Carl is yanked from his life by a random horror — which, the author reveals in an end note, is based in part on a true story of a kidnapping in her own Long Island neighbourhood. Her book, she stresses, is fiction: yet this kernel of fact, and the history in which she grounds it, give it a shocking, memorable weight.

“The ghosts of a family’s troubled past will play out riotously in the soul and on the body of each member of that family in myriad ways.” This sentence comes towards the end of this fine book: its underlying thesis proven in the 380 pages that have come before. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” was Tolstoy’s in Anna Karenina — a theory which, considered for even more than a moment, hardly holds up. No disrespect to Leo, but Brodesser-Akner sets out her stall methodically, truthfully: the Fletchers are unique, absolutely themselves, yet every reader will find something here that they can recognise, that will resonate and endure.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Wildfire £20, 446 pages/Random House $30, 464 pages

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