Long Island Compromise

• Author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: July 9, 2024
• Publisher: Random House

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In 1980 a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in a cloistered town on the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of moving on with their lives. They resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that although their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what ensured their safety. But nearly forty years later, when Carl’s mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything.

After seeing (and missing) the massive hype surrounding Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel and subsequent series, Fleishman Is in Trouble, I didn’t want to miss out on this one. As a person who has lived on Long Island nearly my entire life, I always love finding a book set in my neck of the woods. The fact that the kidnapping is based off a real event only made this more interesting to me.

The story opens with one of the most intriguing hooks that I’ve ever read. I featured it on a First Lines Friday post, because it was so interesting. Beginning with a kidnapping in his own driveway in an affluent neighborhood of Long Island, Carl Fletcher is held for ransom. Less than a week later, he returns home, not harmed too badly.

But the Fletcher story doesn’t start there. It begins with Grandpa Zelig, who escaped the Nazis and arrived in America with nothing but a formula for a new kind of packaging substance. It’s called Styrofoam, and he works his way up to owning a Styrofoam factory. This leaves the family very well off, and he bequeaths not only wealth to his descendants, he leaves them the means to continue accruing wealth. 

Aside from the wealth, Carl and his children develop some trauma stemming from the kidnapping. Carl’s mother forcefully informs him, “This happened to your body, this did not happen to you.” He often repeats that sentence to himself, although it only serves to dissociate him from the experience. The children were young when it occurred, and it affects their lives in different ways. They’re used to inherited wealth. Each of the characters is explored in such wonderful depth, and we get to see their life in detail through their own chapters, which are set after the death of Carl’s mother, almost forty years later.

But when the money suddenly runs out, everything changes for Carl’s three children. Beamer is a hot mess—he’s working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and has a fixation on writing storylines about kidnappings, in between his sessions taking drugs and being dominated in humiliating ways by sex workers. These scenes are described. In detail. It was really uncomfortable to read these scenes. Nathan has become incredibly neurotic, purchasing insurance coverage for every situation possible, especially kidnapping. He’s rigid and anxious and so tightly wound it feels like he’s going to just explode at any moment. Jenny, who was born after the kidnapping, has donated all of her wealth to social justice causes, and actively worked to push away her family and loved ones.

Overall, this was a really interesting read. While the story was a slower-paced, character-driven meander through the trauma of a family and how it impacted each person in the family, I found myself still enjoying it. Normally I gravitate towards faster-paced, plot-driven books, but the way that this book really delved so deeply into each character and fully fleshed them out was fascinating to me. This book explores themes of privilege, wealth, trauma and how it’s passed down through generations, dysfunctional family dynamics, self-sabotaging, and the Jewish experience of assimilation in America.

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