Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner book review

Let’s get this out of the way up front, so to speak: The title of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, “Long Island Compromise,” is a reference to anal sex. That says something about the story’s subtlety.

Not that anybody’s turning to Brodesser-Akner for subtlety. Her previous novel, the spectacular debut “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” crashed onto the scene with klaxons blaring. That tale of a marriage collapsing was a dazzling explosion of comic brilliance that proved the New York Times profile writer could be even more outrageously engaging when she made up her own characters.

But following up after a great debut carries the mixed blessings of inherited wealth, which, as it happens, is the heavy-handed subject of “Long Island Compromise.” It’s a story about the children of a rich family who struggle to fulfill the promise of their wildly successful parents.

The Fletchers of Middle Rock, Long Island, are the very embodiment of the Jewish American Dream. With all the curdled envy that Brodesser-Akner can channel so hilariously, the gossipy narrator tells us, “They were the pinnacle.” They are at once fiercely defensive of their heritage and determined to pursue all the trappings (and plastic surgeries) of assimilation. Eat your heart out, Jay Gatsby: The Fletchers live in the largest house “on a block of extremely robbable homes” with a deck that extends out over the Long Island Sound like it “was their own personal swimming pool.”

Their origin story has been retold and polished like a book of the Torah: Grandpa Zelig escaped the Nazis and made it to the United States with nothing but the clothes on his back and the formula for a revolutionary packaging compound called Styrofoam. A few decades later, the family factory is producing enough polystyrene to keep the Fletchers snugly protected from all the shocks and rattles the world might produce — or so it would seem.

The novel opens in 1980 with a thriller prologue: Thirty-three-year-old Carl Fletcher, son of the late Zelig, is kidnapped by a pair of antisemitic thugs who beat and threaten him for five days. When he’s finally ransomed and released from that ordeal, he spends one month in the hospital and then goes back to work at the factory, “where no one mentioned that he’d been gone.” Grandma Phyllis lays down the law: “Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you.”

It’s hard to imagine more disastrous psychological advice, and when the novel picks up some four decades later, we see the results of adhering to Grandma Phyllis’s insanely repressive diagnosis. No one has ever talked about Carl’s kidnapping, and the residual terror has seeped into the family water table and poisoned his three adult children. Still, despite their weakened constitutions, they may have limped along indefinitely. After all, those $500,000 quarterly dividend checks are wonderfully uplifting!

But then, like some cruel kid wielding a magnifying glass in the sun, Brodesser-Akner burns away the family’s fortune, and we watch the young Fletchers scurrying around in a panic. It’s an ideal catastrophe to evaluate the fortitude of these spoiled beneficiaries of a business they did nothing to create or deserve.

Beamer, the middle child, is a Hollywood screenwriter who’s spent his career recycling increasingly attenuated stories about kidnappings. The novel’s best section takes a vertiginous dive through Beamer’s drug-addled life, spiked with humiliating treatment he purchases from a dominatrix, as he tries to write one more abduction movie that will give him the fame and renown he thinks he deserves. Yes, Brodesser-Akner may be wearing an old pair of Jonathan Franzen’s sneakers, but, my God, she can run like the wind.

From here, though, “Long Island Compromise” begins to flag. The humor is more muted, the pace slower.

Nathan, the oldest child, has reacted to his father’s kidnapping by papering every inch of his existence with insurance policies to protect him from fire, flood, collision, bedbugs, earthquakes, shipwrecks, malpractice and, of course, kidnapping. The narrator notes that Nathan is “not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future.”

And finally, Jenny, who wasn’t even born when their father was abducted, has dedicated her life to the self-righteous rejection of her family, a preoccupation that has left her friendless and joyless.

Unfortunately, these characters are easy to summarize because the novel presents them in the highly schematic framework of a TV sitcom or a Marxist revenge fantasy. (Also, note to novelists: If one of your main characters is a “collection of tics” and your name isn’t Charles Dickens, revise again.) With the Fletchers’ financial ruin confirmed early, we’re left to wend our way through their bankruptcies like passengers ambling through the zigzag line at airport security toward an X-ray inspection that will tell us nothing we don’t already know.

But as always, Brodesser-Akner is a genius with the chaotic flow of embittered family dialogue. In her fiction, conversations dart and turn with the outrageous unpredictability of a flock of frightened birds. And of course, “Long Island Compromise” is often entertaining — after all, Brodesser-Akner is one of the most performative writers alive — but why isn’t it better?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the novel’s long gestation as a kind of psychological solution. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Brodesser-Akner confessed that she’s been thinking for decades about the real-life kidnapping of a family friend named Jack Teich in 1974. How, she asks, could Teich and his wife and children ever recover from that ordeal? But they did. “The Teiches walked in lock step toward a bright future that was, and is, the Jewish dream of America,” she writes. “Can you imagine that you could go through that and end up fine?”

Her interest in the Teiches’ resilience is not just theoretical. As she explains, 16 years ago she suffered a terrifying labor with her first child under the care of a cruel and possibly abusive obstetrician. Why, she wonders, couldn’t she bounce back from that trauma as effectively as Jack Teich and his family did?

Her essay’s deeply personal answer to that question is both a gut punch and a tender embrace. Rather than retreating into the glibness that resolves “Long Island Compromise,” she wrestles candidly with the sweaty details of Teich’s kidnapping, her own emergency C-section and the psychological scars of both. And so, the essay is gripping in a way that this neat, compromised novel ultimately isn’t.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Long Island Compromise

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Random House. 444 pp. $30

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