Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(Random House)
Of the three middle-aged Fletcher siblings whose perspectives are told in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s extremely funny-yet-serious second novel—which was published on July 9, 2024—it pains me to admit that I am a Nathan. Nathan’s the worrier, ramped up to 11 for art’s sake, but I see where Nathan’s coming from. You never know if an old tree that’s been there for hundreds of years might fall on you, is the sort of thought Nathan expresses in Long Island Compromise. That I can relate to. I have wondered about trees. Whereas his kid brother, nicknamed Beamer, stoned out of his mind on drugs some of which I’d never heard of, behaves in ways so irresponsible it’s almost painful (in a good way, as in, the writing is impressive) to read about them.
Nathan and Beamer are a yin to a yang, or more like two sides of a black-and-white cookie. Beamer is a man overflowing with what the biological determinists would call testosterone: no risk untaken, no woman unavailable to him. All id. Nathan’s a little weenie—a Nathan’s—afraid of his own shadow.
There is also a sister, Jenny. She’s the scholar, the rebel, the nose job rejecter. (Rhinoplasty was evidently de rigueur in wealthy Jewish circles on 1998 Long Island; my memory of 1998 Manhattan is that they were viewed among otherwise similar Jews—snobbishly—as very Long Island, so it tracks.) She seems like the sort of person who’d extract herself from a narrow, cossetted suburban upbringing and do great things, but she flounders because… well, because of a family curse.
Carl Fletcher, their mega-rich factory-owner father, was briefly kidnapped for ransom when Beamer and Nathan were young, and just before Jenny was born. This seems like a spoiler but is how the book opens. The siblings’ curse is an impossible-to-disentangle mix of growing up with their traumatized father never reckoning with his experience, and the trust funds making it so that they never need to work. That financial necessity is the mother of getting your act together, to borrow and botch an adage, is, superficially, the point of the book. But there’s far more to it.
***
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a New York Times journalist, known for her celebrity profiles, though the piece of hers I think about the most is an essay on The Rules, the 1990s dating guide advising women to pretend not to be into men so as to seduce those men. I remember enjoying her 2019 novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but not to this extent. I don’t remember basically hurling it at everyone being like, read this immediately.
Long Island Compromise picks up on some of the same themes as Fleishman, including marital woes and the resentments the merely upper middle class can feel towards the rich. It’s the story of the Fletchers, a massively wealthy Reform Jewish family living in something like Great Neck that isn’t Great Neck, told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who grew up with the Fletchers, but without their means. The narrator has a distinct voice and doesn’t shy away from an editorializing comment or fact-check, but only brings in a first-person I near the end, just the once. All the reader knows of the storyteller is that this is someone with a scoop on the Fletchers. It’s fiction, but with real-life inspiration: the 1974 kidnapping of Long Island, NY steel factory owner Jack Teich; Brodesser-Akner knows the family, and she wrote about the story as a form of advance promotion for this novel.
There’s a nostalgia to the book, with its quaintly pre-2020 preoccupations. Daughter Jenny introduced as uninterested in shopping and primping, in what seems like a hint of a gender-topics plotline to come. She is instead a garden-variety (albeit depression-prone) straight woman, vacillating between the draw of the nice boy next door and that of the charismatic cad. And there’s a plot arc around the fact that what the Fletchers got rich producing—polystyrene, known as Styrofoam—now has a terrible environmental reputation. I kept expecting Jenny—a lefty labour organizer—to take a Greta Thunberg turn and denounce her family specifically for making Earth-destroying microplastics, but environmentalism is at most an afterthought.
There are some brief nods to contemporary culture wars, with #MeToo alluded to as on the horizon, and in the painful scene where Beamer thinks he’s written a brilliant script but finds himself facing a sensitivity reader of sorts who alerts him to the problematicness and cultural appropriation and such. Beamer pivots to deciding that he will write about oppression in an #OwnVoices manner, because everyone agrees that Jews are oppressed, right? Poor Beamer, never did stand a chance.
***
The number of times I thought, this, this is the funniest line in the book, is substantial. We learn, of a secondary character who has spent the previous section berating Jenny for being rich and hiding this fact about herself, “Andrew left New Haven soon after he was fired and went to work at his father’s hedge fund.” Any other writer would have said something about how it turned out Andrew was a hypocritical (not to mention antisemitic) rich kid himself, but Brodesser-Akner just drops this detail with utmost elegance. Boom, Andrew interlude over.
We learn that the town of Middle Rock had been called Duty Head, but that it lost that name “immediately when the mayor went to cut the ribbon and that new train station and heard someone say the name Duty Head aloud.” There are passages about families having, or not having, microwaves that would alone be reason to read this book.
Being a woman myself, I cannot speak to whether Brodesser-Akner has cracked the supposedly uncrackable code and entered the minds of male characters, a la Adelle Waldman with The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. She gets details about the menfolk right from what I’ve observed, particularly the stuff where Beamer (who, recall, puts anything and everything into his own body) is quietly judging his wife for getting work done on her face. He thought she was so much prettier before, when they first met! So like a man to forget that, cosmetic interventions or not, women’s faces shift away from conventional ideals as we age.
And the novel’s title, and what it refers to, suggests we no longer need to sit around wondering who will be the next Philip Roth.
***
To speak of the Jewishness of the novel is expected, certainly in this venue. And here I realize the thing to do is to enumerate the references to Reform temple and to Orthodoxy, to the rabbi character, to Hadassah, to the Holocaust, to Israel Bonds, to the way that, much like trauma, the propensity to give out sports-team-themed yarmulkes crosses generations. Bar mitzvah scenes serve the function that a wedding will on a Midsomer Murders. Intermarriage, dybbuks, eating bacon, not eating bacon, it’s all in there.
There are also Jewish in-jokes, at least I think there are. Is the Fletcher patriarch “Zelig” because of the 1983 Woody Allen movie of the same name? (Would have to be, given the role of impersonation in Zelig Fletcher’s origin story.) Does Jenny, in a bout of listlessness, consider “marine biologist” as a career possibility in reference to George Costanza’s fake career? (A stretch, but I like it.)
But it’s impossible to read the book and not see it as being about the hostages. Yes, even though it is not, objectively, about that, because it couldn’t be.
As a strictly chronological matter, Brodesser-Akner started writing Long Island Compromise well before Oct. 7, 2023. But books are published into the worlds that exist when they appear, and it is now all but inevitable that a book about how you can think you’re safe—specifically, that you, as a Jew, as a Jewish family, have found safety—and then all of a sudden someone sneaks up at you and the next thing you know, you’re kidnapped and tortured. Kidnapped and tortured by someone who sees your comfort as at their expense. (Carl’s kidnappers claim to be working on behalf of Palestinian liberation, but this turns out to be part of what is effectively gibberish. The enemy is within, is all I’ll say.)
There’s a passage in the book (more than one, but it’s one in particular coming to mind) about the precariousness of it all, about how the Holocaust and associated horrors and desperation are always lurking. No, the individual Oct. 7 abductees were not Styrofoam gazillionaires, but they were Israelis or others present in Israel who thought they were secure in Israel, who couldn’t have known what was coming for them, and indeed who’d have seemed paranoid if they’d anticipated anything of the kind. And no, being held hostage for over a year is not the same as being locked up for ransom for a week, but the thematic question of the impact on an individual and those close to them resonates.
How are others not seeing this? According to The Forward reporter Mira Fox, “Even their trauma isn’t particularly Jewish; anyone could be kidnapped.” A sentiment I’d have agreed with on Oct. 6, 2023.
Last summer, in his review for the leftist publication Jewish Currents, critic Mitchell Abidor argues that the book “struggles to say anything of substance about being a Jew in America today.” Did he and I read the same book? The safety question—are Jews safe, do Jews feel safe—is central to the postwar Jewish experience and so much more so of late.
Brodesser-Akner’s own main non-fiction interventions in this area are from the before-times—a 2015 Tablet essay about antisemitism and accusations of “Jewish privilege”; a 2021 New York Times review of Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus with insightful personal-political digressions—but you know what? That’s fine. Maybe some moments elude the essay, and are best processed through novels, even ones not directly written about them to begin with.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post The safety question: Jewish existential dilemmas in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hilarious ‘Long Island Compromise’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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