Long Island Compromise (4*)

The Fletcher children are a LOT, that's for sure, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner empathizes with them in the same way that made her profiles (Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jonathan Franzen) in the New York Times Magazine so compelling: she "got" them, perhaps even better than they'd gotten themselves.

Nathan, Beamer and Jenny are traumatized by the kidnapping of their father, the son of a Holocaust survivor named Zelig who made a fortune in styrofoam manufacturing after fleeing Poland with the kind of story that Brodesser-Akner once thought she'd never tell because she felt so removed from it three generations later.  No more, as Long Island Compromise makes painfully clear: her novel examines inherited trauma almost clinically through the lens of Jews as assimilated as she who couldn't be more miserable despite receiving regular quarterly deposits of half a million dollars in their bank accounts.

What makes the novel more than three unrelenting whines, flavored with anxiety, addiction, kink and depression, is Brodesser-Akner's knowing and often amusing portrayal of family dynamics and social milieus similarly evoked by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in the last century minus her believably drawn female characters.  As has often been said, stereotypes exist for a reason;  for delightful but hard-as-nails evidence, look no further than Zelig's wife, the matriarch who counsels her grandson after he announces he has proposed to a woman named . . . Noelle.  

“You know what happens when you marry a young shiksa?” Phyllis had asked him [Beamer], when, in a final plea-threat for him to reconsider, she had appealed not to his conscience but to his vanity. “You end up with an old goya.”

And Phyllis knows from vanity!

Ruth [Beamer's mother], after all, had been watching Phyllis’s face change for years. By then, Phyllis had had several elective surgeries that included an eye lift, a neck lift, a facelift that included a revamp of the initial eye lift and an additional neck lift—everything lifted so high that it appeared that gravity was just another force on Phyllis’s payroll—and finally an emergency procedure in which her septum was reconstructed, as she had outlived all lifespan expectations but nobody had told her nose job that.

Poor Ruth, who mostly raises her kids on sarcasm. Her "Long Island compromise" (Brodesser-Akner gets a lot of mileage out of her title metaphor), is perhaps the novel's most tragic.  The American dream, attainable mostly through marriage for women of Ruth's generation, seduces her before hidden anti-Semitism curdles it into something else entirely.  She eventually realizes what her desire for the "good life" has cost her and her family but as EST proponents once insisted, "understanding is the booby prize."  It's almost as if Brodesser-Akner is forgiving her own mother through this bitter character's long overdue liberation.

She does, however, offer the promise of redemption, at least for the fourth generation of Jews descended from Holocaust survivors .  It occurs in the context of a bar mitzvah rescued from disaster by Fletcher in-laws who are loaded with tradition, not dough. Although an actual 1974 kidnapping inspired Long Island Compromise, I imagine Brodesser-Akner was just as influenced by the events of October 7 almost five decades later: embrace your tribe if you want relief from both your physical and mental suffering.