Book Club (Long Island Compromise)
Thoughts BEFORE Reading
I’ve had Long Island Compromise sitting in my living room for almost six months (I bought it for my wife for her birthday in July), but it was a text message from my friend that caused me to pick it up. A series of three short, declarative text messages actually. They read:
Long Island Compromise.
You must read.
I finished it in 3 days.
That was all I needed to hear. And so here we are.
I don’t know much about author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. But, after some brief research, I can tell you that, rest easy, Taffy is not her real name, but a childhood nickname she continues to use. She was born Stephanie Akner on October 26, 1975, which makes her currently 49 years old. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended New York University. She also writes for GQ and the New York Times, where she’s a contributing writer. The Brodesser comes from her husband, Claude, whom she married in 2006. Wikipedia also tells me that she then converted to Judaism, “a process that eventually led Akner to evaluate and reinforce her own observance of Jewish customs.”
She’s also the author of Fleishman Is In Trouble, which came out in 2019, was a bestseller, and was later turned into a TV show that I started but did not finish. I honestly can’t remember whether I liked it or not, but I’m pretty sure it had Jesse Eisenberg in it.
I’m intrigued to discover the ways in which Brodesser-Akner explores Jewish identity, customs, traditions, stereotypes, humor, etc. Jewish identity has certainly been top of mind in our culture recently with the war in Gaza and all the strife it has wrought at home and abroad. Sidebar, and I’m guessing it was greenlit before Hamas attacked Israel and thrust Jewishness center stage in American life, it was also the topic of a recent Netflix rom-com called Nobody Wants This, starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, about a rabbi who falls in love with a “shiksa” and all the drama that ensues. It’s quite a good show.
Back to the matter at hand: Long Island Compromise. Let’s skip the blurb and summary for now and learn what we can from the cover.
In terms of “reading” the cover of Long Island Compromise, there is far less to work with than with our last book, The Life Impossible, whose cover basically summarized the plot. Here we have a chunky sans-serif font displaying the title and author’s name, along with a single disquieting image: a house on fire. A rather large house I might add. I would also add that the house and fire both have a clip-art, emoji type of un-reality about them. The house feels like a little kid’s drawing of a “mansion.” And the fire similarly is more the idea of fire than a scary inferno. Along with the bright colors of the title and the roundness of the font, this all make me feel like we’re in store for some comedy. And if you’ve been watching or reading anything for the last million years, you’ll know that Jews do comedy really well.
And what about that fire? Are we to infer a house will burn down? I think not. I’m guessing it’s more a metaphorical “house on fire” to do with domestic drama.
And what about that title? What is particular about a compromise on Long Island as opposed to elsewhere? Does the compromise in question have something to do with the mansion and it being “on fire?”
Another thing about the cover is that I’m sort of obsessed with the way the word “compromise” is so awkwardly hyphenated. Did you notice that? It’s off. Normally, in this situation, you would hyphenate a word at the point one syllable changes to another. But this doesn’t. It really should be “Compro-mise” instead of “Compr-omise.” What does it mean? What could it mean? It could mean that the designers really liked this size font and decided for an awkward hyphen point to accommodate. Or it could mean something else. A sense of disruption? Of breakage from norms?
I also notice in looking for far too long at this cover that the word “compromise” contains the word “promise,” which I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed before. Turns out this is no accident. The word “compromise” comes from the Latin compromissus (past participle of compromittere), meaning “to make a mutual promise to accept an arbiter's decision” (com = together; promise = promise).
Okay, let’s peek inside.
Here’s the official summary of Long Island Compromise:
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.
Okay, we now have some answers about the nature of this “compromise,” which very much has to do with the supposed shield of wealth and stature, and what one gives up along the way to hide behind it. It’s right there at the end of the blurb when it says “…they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.”
This blurb is fantastic, by the way, and reminds me of something I heard about this book a while back, which is that it was inspired by a true story of the author’s father’s childhood friend, who was kidnapped from his driveway in 1974. You could do a lot worse for an inciting incident to build a book around than a kidnapping. And the themes of repression and denial are rife with possibility. Add in a boat load of money, drugs, Hollywood, and privilege and we’ve got all the ingredients of a soap opera. Whether the characters will be fun to read about, that remains to be seen.
I will say, though, that in spite of my inference about the humor in the book based on the cover elements, this does not sound all that funny. Or at least the humor within seems farm more likely to be dark in nature rather than farcical or purely ha-ha.
A final thing I’m wondering before I dive in: Will the author be able to create a sense of empathy for these characters? Enormous wealth can be a natural barrier to audience empathy, so I’m intrigued to see how she handles it.
Okay, now that our appetites are fully whet, let’s read!
I’ll be back for our “During” check in about halfway through the book. I truly hope you’ll pick up a copy and read along. Let me know what you’re looking forward to and wondering about!
Until then.