When Carl Fletcher, styrofoam factory owner and one of Long Island’s richer residents, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning, life changes forever for the Fletcher family. Carl is returned unhurt, at least physically, in exchange for a large pile of cash placed on a baggage carousel at La Guardia airport, but the kidnapping still reverberates decades later. His three children have turned out deeply dysfunctional, each in their own way. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an extremely funny satire and deep dive into privilege, Jewish identity and a spot-on comment on how we live now.
‘It happened to his body, it didn’t happen to him’ Carl’s uptight mother and materfamilias keeps repeating as the entire episode is swept under the carpet. Instead, the black hole is filled with charity committees, country club visits and silence. Carl becomes an emotional wreck, Ruth a control freak trying to keep it all together and the children – Jenny, Bernard aka Beamer and Nathan – take it out in whichever way best suits their personality.
30 years on, Beamer is a ‘has-been’ Hollywood screenwriter, addicted to sex and drugs. Our first meeting with him, in a cheap Marriott hotel room, tied up by a toothless hooker, face embedded in the dirty carpet, had me in stitches. Meanwhile, at home, Beamer’s beautiful, ex-actress wife Noelle and their two picture perfect children are blissfully unaware.
Nathan is Beamer’s polar opposite. A nerve wreck of a man whose risk-averseness borders on the compulsive, a man who buys insurance on his insurance. Nathan is about to lose his position as a marginal lawyer at a prestigious law firm, a job Nathan got through no fault of his own.
Jenny’s way of dealing with trauma is through a string of more or less genuine attempts at rejecting privilege and wealth. Arrogant, cantankerous and abrasive, Jenny remains pretty much friendless, partnerless and jobless.
Their lacklustre careers, however, don’t really matter. Their main income is a large monthly deposit into their accounts from Carl’s styrofoam factory. Styrofoam, however, is about to become as unfashionable as the ‘avocado coloured kitchen’ from which Ruth calls her friends on ‘her matching avocado-coloured long-corded landline phone’.
They are not exactly a sympathetic bunch, so if you need to like the protagonists to enjoy a novel, you might want to think twice about reading this. I absolutely loved the humour of, though. As we saw in Brodesser-Akner’s bestselling Fleischman is in Trouble, she has an uncanny ability to expose some of the absurdities of how we live now. Combined with a swipe at privilege and some Woody Allenesque observations about Jewishness, it makes for very entertaining reading. One small caveat: this book, as most other 400+ page books, could have been shorter.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is published by Wildfire, 464 pages.
