What does it mean to come by one’s life honestly? This is the question at the heart of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s generation-spanning sophomore novel, “Long Island Compromise,” which tells the story of a wealthy, dysfunctional suburban Jewish family.
Given the unavoidable success of her debut, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel. In an assimilatory turn, it’s less reminiscent of Roth (Philip or Henry) than of Franzen (Jonathan), whom Brodesser-Akner profiled in her role as staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
A fictionalized account of a true story, “Long Island Compromise” begins in 1980, when the prominent businessman Carl Fletcher is ambushed in his driveway, taken to unknown parts and tortured by unknown parties. Bubble burst, the house is suddenly teeming with F.B.I. agents as Carl’s frantic wife, Ruth, finds herself taking her younger son, Bernard, on an elaborate ransom drop, a day that will scar both him and his older brother, Nathan, for life.
Not to mention Carl himself, who, upon his release, is advised by his mother to compartmentalize his trauma (“Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in”). No dice. Carl spends the next several hundred pages on an ineffective cocktail of antidepressants, alternating between jags of hysteria and vegetation, a glass ornament of a father to Nathan, Bernard and Jenny, who has the questionable luck of being born just after the family tragedy. Ruth, who was so sure she’d escaped the paranoia hurricane of her scrappy childhood, finds herself back in its eye. “It started right now, the real division of her life,” Brodesser-Akner writes: “before the kidnapping and after it.”
The novel is loosely divided into three sections, told from the third-person perspectives of the three children, now in their late 30s and early 40s, laying out the cornucopia of ways in which they are screwed up by latent generational trauma, their father’s repression and the affluence that insulates them. “They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it.”
Bernard, or Beamer, has become a handsome, BDSM-loving, shiksa-marrying, drug-addled screenwriter who cannot think of a single plot without a kidnapping at its core and is constantly pretending to take phone calls, sometimes for the sake of avoidance, sometimes for the illusion of importance. (Each character has a conversational tic; I’m partial to the way Ruth mumbles some iteration of “Leonard Bernstein over here” or “Julius Rosenberg over here” whenever she’s displeased with her seditious spawn.) Then there’s Nathan, a neurotic and servile land-use lawyer who has put all his eggs in a friend’s S.E.C.-violating basket and is married to a moral Orthodox woman who just wants to redo the kitchen. Finally, Jenny is a drifting intellectual snob who eschews attachment to friends, men, money or careers until the day she becomes aware of the concept of union organizing.
The Fletchers’ source of wealth is a factory started by Carl’s father, Zelig, who narrowly escaped Nazi Poland. Threaded throughout the novel is the phrase “there’s a dybbuk in the works,” a family saying regarding a malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore that applies equally to malfunctioning machinery, “an infestation of ants in a sugar bowl or Cossacks murdering your siblings in front of you.” Well, the dybbuk is about to hit the fan in this way-below-code factory that produces polystyrene molds for insulation.
As it is with cholesterol, there are good and bad kinds of cleverness, and though Brodesser-Akner tends to traffic in the former (prepare to be delighted by the triple entendre of the novel’s title), things can get awfully symbolic for these self-stymied siblings who grew up in a town called Middle Rock.
But look what you get for the price of a few corny jokes! A satchel of 20th-century American Jewry deep cuts (“Easter eggs,” as they might be called in more gentile endeavors): Hadassah bowling leagues, Viennese dessert tables, Israel bonds, the song “Y.M.C.A.,” “Jewish-holiday crisp” weather.
“Long Island Compromise” is a heavily populated satire with more cul-de-sacs than the whole of Nassau County; but all those narrative asides about jealous neighbors and forays into Zelig’s harrowing tale of survival propel the novel. This is because when Brodesser-Akner dives, she does so without making a splash, seamlessly entering the mind of Jenny, who fetishizes freedom when she already has it; or Bernard, who sincerely wonders: “Did either of them notice that while Charlie typed, Beamer stood behind him, saying ‘Yes, right. Exactly!’ but did not also contribute any new ideas?”
Brodesser-Akner is empathetic to her characters’ pathological inability to know themselves, but she is also merciless when it comes to the idea that acknowledging confusion is not enough. Zelig came over on a boat and it wasn’t the Mayflower, so are they still victims when their privilege is undeniable? Unable to answer this question in the mirror, they seek validation from co-workers, lovers and partners. Oh, how they long to be good. Or if not good, better. Or if not better, bearable.
They hail from a generation for whom the Holocaust was both last week and a colloquial cudgel (“Hitler would have loved your help, Jennifer,” Carl’s mother says to her granddaughter), a generation whose grandparents came from nothing unless you count mortal danger as something. Brodesser-Akner does not defend the myriad manners in which these three fumble the inheritance of suffering, as much as she seeks to define their crisis. She strives to dig a hole through the clichés and, for the most part (this reader could have done with less rhinoplasty and I.B.S.), she comes out the other side with a dynamic story about an American family.
Fresh off adapting “Fleishman” for television, Brodesser-Akner incorporates screenwriting tropes into her prose (“CUT TO: Within a few minutes, he was back in his car”), sometimes in ways that feel less than intentional. After Carl is kidnapped, setting the town aflutter, a woman in an “avocado-colored kitchen” uses “her matching avocado-colored long-corded landline phone” to call a neighbor with a “mustard-colored” version of the same setup. Cue the split-screen. “The Royal Tenenbaums” in a yarmulke, or so a studio pitch might go: You’ve got the younger brother flirting with self-harm, the brilliant but icy sister and the eldest, a father to fearful twin boys whose joint bar mitzvah provides the culminating festivity of the novel.
The author also makes a few fairly transparent efforts to break up streams of dialogue toward the end. In the words of countless American children of the 20th century, Jewish or otherwise, her epidermis is showing. But the point of that joke is: Yeah, of course it is. All those well-timed twists, neat callbacks and tidy scenes are a mitzvah for this satisfying, touching novel. The talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner over here.