Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I loved this novel for its sharp, whip-smart observations and turns of phrase. I love a book with funny, revelatory descriptions and this one delivers. It is a simple plot that is basically an excuse to delve into the theme of generational inheritance and trauma. The Fletcher family is scarred by their father’s kidnapping, their inherited wealth, as well as the toxicity of the family business – a styrofoam factory. The character development is thorough with each sibling getting a good chunk of ink, allowing for the nuclear family described from various angles and points in time. We also see the family characters as they bump up against the outside world – employers, spouses, love interests, friends, and employees. These scenes offer comedic dialogue, examples of paranoia, neurosis, and guilt – scenes which the author has great skill in painting to the extent they could be laugh out loud funny and cringe-worthy at the same time. The reader deduces from the opening pages that this is a doomed family, the novel portraying their fall from grace, nevertheless there is so much intelligent language and observation to be soaked up from every page. Highly recommend.

About Long Island Compromise:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • New York Magazine’s Beach Read Book Club Pick • Belletrist Book Club Pick

“A big, juicy, wickedly funny social satire . . . probably the funniest book ever about generational family trauma.”—Oprah Daily

“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.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.