How to follow Fleishman is in Trouble, one of the most memorable novels of the last few years, subsequently developed into an equally brilliant television series? More of the same, or total departure of topic? With Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner has done a little of both, to fantastic effect.
Once again, Brodesser-Akner’s fictional world is populated by anxiety-ridden Jews, living on the Eastern Seaboard, grappling with challenges that only really apply to the one per cent. In Fleishman the characters were merely impressively wealthy; the Fletcher family are disgustingly so, and money is at the root of the tragedies that befall them.
Long Island Compromise starts with a kidnapping. Carl Fletcher, family patriarch, community macher and packaging company scion is eventually returned to his distraught mother and wife, but the trauma he endures has a ripple effect through the generations.
There’s Beamer, taken along on the rescue mission as a toddler, who becomes a Hollywood cokehead and sex addict of limited talent but enormous self-delusion. Neurotic Nathan is devastatingly unable to convert his gilded start into any form of achievement as an adult. And, finally, Jenny, born after the kidnapping, a permanent student activist railing against her inner Jewish American princess.
All three consistently fail to live up to their father, and even more so their Holocaust-survivor grandfather, founder of the business and the ultimate embodiment of the Jewish American dream. In short, they are all awful. Not just awful, but appallingly so. Worse, they don’t seem to realise how awful they are.
And then the money runs out, just as the family sits shiva for Carl’s mother, prompting the kind of devastatingly funny collision of events that only ever happens in fiction. Brodesser-Akner is a master of character observation, skewering everyone with equal glee, from Noelle, Beamer’s waspy wife with her Los Angeles pretensions, to Mickey, the mercenary old friend whom Nathan mistakenly puts faith in. At times, I wondered if she believes there to be anyone genuinely good and kind in the world.
Still, this is an absolute masterpiece, sharp, addictive and gasp-inducing throughout. Is the family’s collapsing fortune the fault of a dybbuk cursing them, or is it their hubris? And to what extent is Brodesser-Akner making a broader comment on Jewish Americans becoming increasingly removed from their immigrant roots? Long Island Compromise leaves you with much to consider.
