Long Island Compromise
A Novel
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- 59,99 lei
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- 59,99 lei
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An exhilarating novel about one American family and the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, Town & Country, New York Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Parade, Kirkus Reviews
“The best book about America I’ve read lately . . . The novel concerns being Jewish, being an immigrant, class, family, wealth, and how that wealth can disfigure people. It’s all terribly funny, which always helps.”—David Sedaris for Time, “25 Books That Capture This American Moment”
“Joins the pantheon of great American novels.”—Los Angeles Times
“Exuberant and absorbing . . . a big old-fashioned social novel.”—The Atlantic
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, beaten, and ransomed. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, and the family moves on, comforted in the realization that if their money was what endangered them, it is also what assured their safety.
But forty years later, it’s clear that nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has secretly sought closure for decades, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic anxiety keeps him from advancing at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—drugs, food, women—to numb his terror; and Jenny is so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. When they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, they must face questions about the part wealth has played in their lives’ successes and failures and confront the trauma that has stunted each of them.
With depth and surprising hilarity, Long Island Compromise winds through one family’s history, all the way to the outrageous present, confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, achievement, boredom, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta blockers, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Belletrist Book Club Pick
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this barbed, deep-diving satire, dysfunction is practically emblazoned on a wealthy family’s coat of arms. The Fletchers are a Long Island Jewish family living the early 1980s version of the good life when patriarch Carl is kidnapped but released unharmed a week later. Physically, anyway—the psychological fallout of the kidnapping ricochets for decades. In her follow-up to Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner jumps between decades to follow the Fletchers as they grapple uneasily with daily life. She moves like an acrobat between soulful sadness and scathing wit, dropping in delicious set pieces like a lavish bar mitzvah with a NY Knicks theme and hilariously quotable lines like “My trainer says hydration is a myth.” There’s scarcely a scrap of modern American culture Long Island Compromise doesn’t touch. And when you can’t decide whether to laugh or cry, you may end up doing both.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he's still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There's Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who's too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they've all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner's latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman's stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe's novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem's stories. This is a comedic feast.
