Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Long Island Compromise by Taffy
Brodesser-Akner
English | 2024 | General Fiction
An exhilarating novel about one
American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the
wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling
author of Fleishman Is in Trouble
“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.