Book Review: ‘Long Island Compromise,’ by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

What does it mean to come by one’s life honestly? This is the question at the heart of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s generation-spanning sophomore novel, “Long Island Compromise,” which tells the story of a wealthy, dysfunctional suburban Jewish family.

Given the unavoidable success of her debut, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel. In an assimilatory turn, it’s less reminiscent of Roth (Philip or Henry) than of Franzen (Jonathan), whom Brodesser-Akner profiled in her role as staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

A fictionalized account of a true story, “Long Island Compromise” begins in 1980, when the prominent businessman Carl Fletcher is ambushed in his driveway, taken to unknown parts and tortured by unknown parties. Bubble burst, the house is suddenly teeming with F.B.I. agents as Carl’s frantic wife, Ruth, finds herself taking her younger son, Bernard, on an elaborate ransom drop, a day that will scar both him and his older brother, Nathan, for life.

Not to mention Carl himself, who, upon his release, is advised by his mother to compartmentalize his trauma (“Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in”). No dice. Carl spends the next several hundred pages on an ineffective cocktail of antidepressants, alternating between jags of hysteria and vegetation, a glass ornament of a father to Nathan, Bernard and Jenny, who has the questionable luck of being born just after the family tragedy. Ruth, who was so sure she’d escaped the paranoia hurricane of her scrappy childhood, finds herself back in its eye. “It started right now, the real division of her life,” Brodesser-Akner writes: “before the kidnapping and after it.”

The novel is loosely divided into three sections, told from the third-person perspectives of the three children, now in their late 30s and early 40s, laying out the cornucopia of ways in which they are screwed up by latent generational trauma, their father’s repression and the affluence that insulates them. “They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it.”

Bernard, or Beamer, has become a handsome, BDSM-loving, shiksa-marrying, drug-addled screenwriter who cannot think of a single plot without a kidnapping at its core and is constantly pretending to take phone calls, sometimes for the sake of avoidance, sometimes for the illusion of importance. (Each character has a conversational tic; I’m partial to the way Ruth mumbles some iteration of “Leonard Bernstein over here” or “Julius Rosenberg over here” whenever she’s displeased with her seditious spawn.) Then there’s Nathan, a neurotic and servile land-use lawyer who has put all his eggs in a friend’s S.E.C.-violating basket and is married to a moral Orthodox woman who just wants to redo the kitchen. Finally, Jenny is a drifting intellectual snob who eschews attachment to friends, men, money or careers until the day she becomes aware of the concept of union organizing.