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Name: Long Island Compromise: A Novel - Kindle edition by Brodesser-Akner, Taffy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Rating: 4.2 (712 reviews)

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Long Island Compromise: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 712 ratings

in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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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.

Print length

442 pages
Sprache

Englisch
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Random House
Publication date

July 9, 2024
File size

2643 KB
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From the Publisher

An outrageously funny Jewish American saga of wealth, generational trauma, and family

The first generation builds the house. The second lives in it. The third burns it down.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Another tale of modern neuroses, told with bombastic appeal . . . Brodeser-Akner’s sweep and verve is masterful; there are echoes of Philip Roth here in her examination of American Jewish identity, the promise of America, the thrill of reinvention, the prison of privilege. I can’t think of another living writer better at crafting tales of acute and searing pathos, all while pleasing readers in the process.”—Vogue

“Funny, raunchy and very, very Long Island.”—Newsday

“The wizard Weisenheimer behind Fleishman Is in Trouble is back with a big, juicy, wickedly funny social satire. . . . As weird as this may sound—Brodesser-Akner has written probably the funniest book ever about generational family trauma.”—Oprah Daily

“As she did in Fleishman, Brodesser-Akner once again demonstrates a gift for capturing the dark, unforgiving things people do and say to the ones they are supposed to love the most.”—Vulture

“A great American Jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth. A triumph.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Brodesser-Akner is a steady, imaginative, insightful writer, and there are riotous passages, haunting dybbuks, and unseen twists that make it thoroughly discussable. Readers will get lost and found in its universe of wealth, family, faith, and other fallible securities.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Every story is keenly observed yet sympathetic, whether it’s the origin myth of grandfather Zelig, Long Island real estate maneuverings, over-the-top themed bar and bat mitzvahs, or the skewering of Hollywood politics . . . Generational trauma has never been so funny as when Brodesser-Akner writes it. This book is a must-read for those who like witty, observational novels, family sagas, and sharp dialogue and characterization.”—Library Journal, starred review

About the Author

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the creator and executive producer of its Emmy-nominated limited series adaptation for FX. Long Island Compromise is her second novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Dybbuk in the Works

Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?

On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, Carl Fletcher, one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb where we grew up, was kidnapped from his driveway on his way to work.

It had been an unremarkable morning. Carl had awoken and showered and dressed and gone downstairs to kiss his wife, Ruth, goodbye, same as always. Ruth had already presented their two sons, Nathan and Bernard, with their bowls of Product 19 when Carl patted them on the head and left the kitchen and headed out the door into the bright sunlight. The weather was still generally straightforward back then, and spring peeked through the slush of a latest-winter storm that was taking its time to melt. The reflection blinded him a little; his vision was still pocked with dark spots when he inserted the keys into the door of the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham he’d purchased the previous year.

His brain hadn’t yet registered the sound of someone else’s footsteps through the slush before a man leapt from behind onto Carl’s back and hooded him in one fast, balletic move, turning Carl’s world instantly to black. Inside the hood were the amplified sounds of Carl’s own suddenly fast breathing and grunting. Someone else—there were two men—pulled the keys from the lock and settled himself into the driver’s seat while the first man struggled with Carl. Now, Carl was a tall man. The two men seemed significantly smaller. It was only the shock of the attack that allowed them to successfully wrest Carl into the footwell of his car.

The Brougham drove away, down and out the C-shaped driveway, away from the giant waterfront Tudor on St. James Drive where the Fletchers lived. It drove through the township of Middle Rock, making a right onto Ocean Vista Road, passing the Fletchers’ neighbors’ own colossal homes, then over the bridge, then gliding right by, at the 1.8-mile mark, the sixteen-acre estate where Carl had grown up and where his mother was sitting at a Queen Anne desk right at that very moment, writing checks to the electric company and to the synagogue. Then, past the library, past the butcher, past Duplo’s Ski and Skate Shop, where Carl’s mother had bought him roller skates as a child and where he himself had just recently bought a first tennis racquet for his older son; past the turnoff to the synagogue where Carl had been bar mitzvahed; past the reception hall where he’d gotten married; past the two-block ghetto of auto repair shops, making a right turn onto Shore Turnpike and out of Middle Rock, which, until that moment, was most famous for being the setting of a famous novel from the 1920s (and its author’s residence there) and, since, for being the first American suburb to arrive at a Jewish population of fifty percent.

The kidnappers drove for about an hour until they stopped, pulled Carl out of the footwell, and dragged him up a few steps, into somewhere cavernous (the echo of the footsteps told Carl the place was cavernous), then dragged him down two flights of what felt like the same kind of serrated steel-tread stairs they had at the factory that Carl owned, Consolidated Packing Solutions, Ltd. From the steps he was pushed into a small space that he surmised was a closet. The dark became darkest. The Brougham was never found.

Carl was not suspected to be missing until around three o’clock that afternoon. An hour before that, Ruth had looked at the clock and realized that it was time to pick up Nathan from school. She was in the early stages of her third pregnancy and her morning sickness hadn’t abated by the afternoon and she was concerned it wasn’t actually morning sickness but a virus that had sent her to the couch that morning and kept her there for most of the afternoon, letting Bernard, who was four, watch three reruns of Gilligan’s Island in a row. She considered calling her friend Linda Messinger and asking her to pick Nathan up, but she’d already asked Linda to take him to school in the morning in the first place with her own six-year-old, Jared. Linda did not yet know that Ruth was pregnant, and so Ruth didn’t want to ask her—a two-way favor would have sold Ruth and her condition out, and Ruth didn’t want anyone to know this early, not even Linda Messinger, who she wasn’t always so sure was rooting for her. She instead called her mother-in-law, Phyllis. Phyllis was a widow with a driver and lived just up the road, a spry fifty-five or fifty (she had destroyed all records of her birth when she turned thirty-six or thirty-one—nobody knew for sure).

While Ruth waited for Nathan, she called the factory to ask Carl if he could pick up eggs and spaghetti on his way home. Carl’s secretary, Hannah Zolinski, answered the phone and made noises of delay and then confusion and then finally told Ruth that Carl had never made it into the office that day. Hannah had assumed he was taking a day off. She’d been surprised, she told Ruth, since there was a purchase order that needed fulfilling for the Albertson’s account, and Carl had expressed concern the day before that the drafting department was lagging on the order. This would put the factory behind schedule by days or weeks. Hannah hadn’t called him at home because, she told Ruth, there was no need to; the drafting department had delivered and everything was running smoothly for Albertson. (Secretly, Hannah was worried that Carl had told her he was taking the day off and she hadn’t remembered, which would make Carl angry. Hannah had recently become engaged to a man from the factory’s engineering department and had already been berated by Carl for her distraction several times in the prior two weeks. Carl, Hannah knew, took pride in a distinct form of management: running “a tight ship,” which mostly meant walking around with the baseline assumption that everyone was stealing from him constantly—sometimes in the form of money, but especially in the form of time. This was a lesson passed to him by his own father, who had founded and run the factory all the way up to his death, and this was why Carl rarely took time off, much less spontaneous time, and also why Hannah later told the police that she felt she would have remembered it if Carl had told her he was taking the day.)

Ruth hung up the phone, her finger to her mouth. She stood for a long minute, the phone going dead, then silent, then the dial tone, then the obscene, too-loud clamor of a 1980s kitchen phone off the hook. Her mother-in-law walked in and looked from Ruth to the phone and then back to Ruth.

“What is wrong with you?” Phyllis asked.

Within twenty minutes, the local police arrived. Within an hour, Ruth’s mother, Lipshe, entered. Within twenty-four hours, the FBI was setting up camp at Carl and Ruth’s home: five full-time agents (two of whom were named John), one of them a woman (Leslie), around the clock, sleeping in the guest rooms and the kids’ rooms and the living room. There were three members of the Middle Rock Police Department assigned to the house, but they were mostly useless. Owing to its wealth and relative distance from anything that resembled a working-class neighborhood, Middle Rock was a preternaturally safe place in the 1980s, and the police there had no experience dealing with something as strange and theoretically violent as a suddenly missing person.

Ruth showed the agents recent pictures of Carl from their nephew’s bar mitzvah and gave a description: six foot three, meaty but not fat, a prolific head of beautiful brown hair that defied logic—at thirty-three, a mere one on the Hamilton-Norwood baldness scale, same as when she met him—brown eyes that always looked like they were in a squint but were nonetheless kind, and a nose whose apex pointed downward so that he almost always looked like he was slightly repulsed by the thing he was looking at. Ruth’s eyes stopped on a picture of the two of them dancing, her looking over her shoulder, perhaps her name being called by someone or just the photographer who took the picture. “This is us dancing,” she said. The agents nodded thoughtfully and wrote in their notepads.

And they asked questions: Was anyone angry at him? Did anyone have reason to threaten him? Did he ever talk about enemies, or even something more innocuous, like a random person who hated him? Was there—just hear us out—was there possibly another woman?

“You keep mentioning this Hannah Zolinski,” one of the Johns said, checking his notes.

“She’s his secretary,” Ruth said, exasperated. She did not like feeling accused; she did not like that in addition to managing the stress of this absurd situation, she had to also clear her husband’s reputation when it seemed very clear to nearly everyone that he was a victim of something. “If you knew how he gets frustrated with her,” she tried. Then, quickly, as if this might vindicate him in his absence: “She’s engaged! Hannah is recently engaged! To a Socialist!”

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08HHTBJ8G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (July 9, 2024)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 9, 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2643 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 442 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593243897

Best Sellers Rank: #2,864 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #11 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #13 in Satire Fiction
- #18 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction

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4.2 712 ratings

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and the author of two novels: Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019, Random House), which she adapted into an Emmy-nominated limited series for FX in 2022; and Long Island Compromise (2024, also Random House). She lives in New York City.

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Angie

inherited family trauma

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2024

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If there is a quintessential “inherited family trauma” novel, this is it.

They’re Jewish, because of course they are.

The Fletcher family is defined by an event in which the patriarch is kidnapped and held for ransom over five days. That event is a turning point which shaped his wife, his children, and his company. This isn’t a thriller or detective work, it is more of a character study in how we are affected by it. And that meaning all of us, really. As one character says, “if all of us are traumatized, then no one is traumatized.”

This novel is as Jewish as it gets, they have a rich history, have all the right neuroses and culture, and it manifests itself in many,many ways. I mean, it literally has Mandy Patinkin in it.

The last two pages are, frankly,brilliantly written.

Now, this is not your formulaic romance or mystery, and of course I love those. Who doesn’t? I didn’t love Beamer’s story, and his was the longest, and first. So 25-30% of the way through, was mediocre for me. He is unlikable and pathetic, and until the story blossoms it is a bit sad. Don’t give up on the Fletchers, though.

Themes- inherited family trauma, anxiety and depression, is being morn into money an asset or a liability? Do you ever really get over trauma or does it shape you,

There are also these anecdotal stories woven in (looks at the Finklestein scandal) that as a stand alone story are completely engaging, yet relevant to the overall story.

I’ve read 240 books so far this year, and I can tell you now, this is in my top ten.

23 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

should have been edited

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2024

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Very long and convoluted family saga, confusing parts because it went back and forth between characters.
In the end it went on too long. Many meandering diatribes that were superfluous. Just tell the story

6 people found this helpful

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Eric Selby

Brilliant Satire, Absolutely Brilliant

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2024

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I am at 83 still a voracious reader. I especially like brilliant satire. And that's--oy vey!--what Taffy Brodesser-Aknew's new novel is, consistently so for over 400 pages. My husband is Jewish. And I have had a lot of Jewish students in my teaching career as well as a lot of Jewish friends. This country is culturally richer because of all the Jewish writers--think Philip Roth, for example--as well as Hollywood-ers. I watch re-runs of "All in the Family," written by a very famous Jew. So now comes Ms. Brodesser-Akner's novel. The novel opens in Long Island where the Fletcher family dwell in McMansions: the matrirach in hers from which she governs her grown sons and their families and one son nearby with his wife and their two sons. He oversees the family business. But suddenly he is kidnapped. But there has been no word from those who sold him away from his office. And from there come the ransom business. And then suddenly four decades have come and gone. The two brothers are now adults, one of which has a high level of sexual needs. He, with a partner, are movie producers. So if you are like me and find so much Hollywood-ish junks out there, well, this is a satire about that! And so much more. Be prepared to laugh--a lot.

5 people found this helpful

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Leigh Anne S

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2024

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I wanted to like this book as much as I loved Fleishman is in Trouble, but I just couldn’t. All of the characters were miserable, unlikeable people. It was a really long slog to get to an ending that really had very little redemption.

9 people found this helpful

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hi ok bk

The great family novel of 2024

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2024

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Taffy is a journalist through and through and uses her deep reporting abilities to paid scenes that jump off the page with detail and color. But the reason this book works so well is the way generational trauma is unpacked (and repacked and unpacked again), that makes this her most compelling work to date. We have a group chat debating the forthcoming Apple TV series casting. I am counting down the days to return to this horrible, honorable, messed up family story.

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Amazon Customer

How a wealthy family deals with a kidnaping: a novel drawn from real life events

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2024

I am of two minds with this novel, which chronicles a fictional Jewish family on the north shore of Long Island and how they devolve after the father is kidnapped for a week. The three children are tracked as they grow up into dysfunctional adults with addiction problems, with marital problems, and with various other issues in trying to cope with their father's ordeal. The Long Island Compromise is really a devil's bargain -- having lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs in America, after escaping the Holocaust, after dealing with numerous anti-semitic people, places, and circumstances. Having grown up on Long Island's south shore and raised my daughter on the North Shore in a community that mirrors what is described in fictional terms in the novel, this story resonated with me. The excesses experiences with the family's wealth, and with trying to out-Jew their neighbors is all too real.

So is their reaction to the father's kidnapping, which manifests itself in different ways to each family member. Some choose avoidance : "any reference to a thing that could later be a trigger to discuss The Thing" -- the kidnapping -- is a very apt way to describe grief and the fragility of those who are grieving.

So what is there not to like about this book? It isn't that it cuts too close to home. It isn't that its scenes of BDSM or drug abuse or numerous hooker and mystic encounters are (as I imagine) too realistic. The descriptions are sometimes just so filled with irony and accuracy that I would often pause while reading to let them sink in. But they could be hard to take for some readers. And for those of you who grew up in suburbia, or who are Jewish, this could be entertaining, poignant, or both. Certainly, its treatment of how families confront their destinies and future potential is laid bare in a way that I haven't seen very often, and is quite genuine.

The novel is based on this actual kidnapping of Jack Teich that happened in the 1970s.

10 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

excellent

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2024

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This book is excellent. There are some graphic moments that are hard to read, but the character development, plot, and social commentary are outstanding. There’s so much to think about and unpack after reading this novel.

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2024

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I loved that this book was so epic! It introduced me to 4 generations of a family. It was funny, heartbreaking, surprising, and gave me lots to ponder when I finished reading!

2 people found this helpful

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Valerie

what a great novel, left with lots to think about

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2024

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I read this shortly after reading The Winner by Teddy Wayne. Both deal with the psychology of coming from money, or being without but incredibly close to wealth. Both left me with lots to think over.

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