Long Island Compromise
A Novel
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- $13.99
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
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • New York Magazine’s Beach Read Book Club Pick • Belletrist Book Club Pick
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, Town & Country, Kirkus Reviews
“Joins the pantheon of great American novels.”—Los Angeles Times
“Exuberant and absorbing . . . a big old-fashioned social novel.”—The Atlantic
“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.
But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, 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 fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.
Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
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.
Customer Reviews
A world of depth & stark reality painted perfectly
I’m so glad to have read this. Every detail of every character, scene, smell, attitude was beautifully & realistically drawn.
Uncompromising
I loved this story of a family done in by too much money! The writing is great- from twists to disasters to laugh-out-loud hijinx, tremendous descriptions, and keenly observed characters: I loved every minute of this book!
Long Island Compromise
Crap.