Book Club (Long Island Compromise)
Thoughts AFTER Reading
Long Island Compromise was a fantastic read. Truly. I’m a fan. Brodesser-Akner is a writer whose style I admire and whose courage I envy. I’ve already recommended this book to a handful of bookish friends.
BUT!
Man oh man am I really tired of these characters. How about you? If I was at a party with all of them, the end of the book would be the point at which I would have said I was going to the bathroom, or had to make a quick phone call, and snuck out the back door.
The main characters—especially the Fletcher children Beamer, Nathan, and Jenny—are immensely compelling to read about. I enjoyed having my nose up to their fishbowl for four hundred pages. Reading about their lives and exploits felt a bit like watching Jersey Shore or the Real Housewives. You secretly love watching these people be ridiculous and horrible, but you would never actually want to be friends with them.
In many ways, Jenny’s conundrum—the profound sense of shame and aimlessness she feels over her privileged upbringing—is the most compelling of those experienced by the three Fletcher children. Modern abundance is meant to be a boost to modern people, to mankind in general. Our lives are so much easier now! Right? And yet, I think many of us sense, at least on a small scale, what Jenny experiences on a grand one. That the abundance that surrounds us is also a burden that has the power to corrupt our humanity. It can make us shallow. Selfish. Disconnected. Entitled beyond belief. No matter how hard Jenny tries to be a good person, a useful person, she keeps swinging and missing because her pampered upbringing has soiled her to the core. Fastened on blinders that make it not just difficult, but impossible, to see everything that’s happening around her. Certainly not the genuine strife experienced by so called “normal” people like the workers at her family’s factory who all lose their jobs.
What surprised me most was that, in the end, it’s actually Ruth, the Fletcher matriarch, who emerges as the novel’s most dynamic and memorable character. This I did not see coming because for much of the book, Ruth is a comic foil, mostly played for laughs as the overbearing Jewish mother. But in the novel’s final moments, we get our turn in Ruth’s mind, and the experience is haunting. The moment when, after criticizing her daughter Jenny for being a spoiled brat for the millionth time, Ruth is stopped cold by the sudden realization that she herself is to blame for her children’s shortcomings is one of the novel’s most effective gut punches. In trying to help her children avoid the struggles and fear she experienced growing up without money, she does what Americans do best: she overcorrects. She so protects and shields her children from struggle that by the time they get to be adults, they don’t know how to.
“Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise,” the book’s final pages muse, “that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basketcase, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them…” (437.)
And the “terrible ending” mentioned on the novel’s very first page (“Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?”) comes full circle in a satisfyingly clever way. The “terrible” ending turns out to be that, even though the Fletchers are edging close to the precipice of poverty the whole novel, sent into panic by the looming loss of their wealth, they’re saved in the end—literally by a bag of jewels. Suddenly, they’re filthy rich again. That is the terrible ending. That they won’t ever improve or learn or grow. Those blinders are going to stay right where they are. “See? A terrible ending. There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age, no plastic hour brought to fruition. There would be no reckoning with all that had happened. Their problems were solved, and there was no need for any of that now. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.”
This notion is intensely powerful, and though Long Island Compromise may be in danger of oversimplifying this truth, the long and unsparing look into the mirror slaps. The novel’s thesis is that wealth makes people less dynamic, less capable, less kind. Just less in every sense of the word. You have far more, but you are way less.
I do wonder if this is as true in life as the novel would have us believe, but it has the weight of truth. And that’s what matters in fiction.
The novel chooses to make Carl, the Fletcher patriarch who was kidnapped at the beginning, a bit of an afterthought, which feels like one of the book’s only miscalculations, since his experience is in many ways the most “authentic” thing experienced by any of the characters. The horror of his actual kidnapping is probably the only part of the book that doesn’t have an asterisk attached to it where the asterisk says: due to emotional blindness caused by extreme wealth.
While Carl was in captivity all those years ago, he was blindfolded, gagged, taunted, pissed on, and tormented for five straight days. He was told his family had been murdered, that his wife was being serially raped. He’s traumatized for life and never comes close to recovering. Except, even though we sense it, we don’t really know all this until the book’s very final pages.
In the long introduction, when it turns out that Carl is not only alive, but has been being held captive in the basement of his own factory only a few miles from his mansion, it lends an air of irony and ridiculousness to the proceedings that colors everything that comes after. Makes it hard to feel the full weight of the trauma. We’ve been told that Carl is not the same after, that the incident has permanently affected him and his family, but I personally would have had more empathy for Carl had I known the horrible specifics of his captivity earlier in the book.
Brodesser-Akner is an incredibly smart writer, so clearly she structured the book the way she did for very good reason. Perhaps one of the points is that since no one else in the family knows the full horror of Carl’s ordeal, we shouldn’t either. But now that I know the full and terrible truth is eventually coming, it feels like a lot to ask to fill in the blanks in the meantime.
But that’s a minor critique on an otherwise deeply enjoyable and affecting literary ride. I’m glad I took it.
Which brings us to the end. As ever, if you read along, I’d love to know your thoughts and experiences. And chime in with any recommendations for the next edition of book club!
Til next time.