After reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, I shouted “Oy Gevult!”, which can be translated from Yiddish as “God help me!”, because the book was as painful to read as her first novel, the bestselling Fleischman Is In Trouble.
It’s not because either work is badly written. In fact, Long Island Compromise is an audacious and darkly humorous epic about the rise and fall of a “great” suburban Jewish American dynasty. Although the book’s prose is occasionally overwrought, as Brodesser-Akner explores every minor character’s obscure narrative thread to the last detail, the threads are ultimately woven into a fine fabric by a bold but satisfying act of sleight of hand.
Long Island Compromise was painful to read because I hated all its characters – because I grew up with them. Like Jenny, the daughter of Carl Fletcher – the novel’s central figure – I too fled my predominantly Jewish Long Island suburb as soon as I could.
I was leaving behind the culture of turned-up nose jobs, ironed hair, drug addictions, McMansions, designer everything and a caste system defined not by achievement or artistry but by wealth and physical beauty.
Though I was running away from my parents’ ceaseless Holocaust trauma, Jenny was fleeing the central trauma of Long Island Compromise, which was her father’s shocking kidnapping from his own driveway, followed by a week of blindfolded brutality and starvation, only to be released once his captors received a ransom of US$250,000, most of which was never retrieved.
Upon his release, Carl became a haunted shell of his former self and returned to his wife Ruth, pregnant with Jenny, and his two young sons – Nathan, six, and two-year-old Bernard (later nicknamed Beamer). He also came back to his widowed mother, Phyllis, the family matriarch, who continually told him to move ahead with his life because the “kidnapping happened to your body and not to you!”
The book begins with the kidnapping. The rest of it examines the consequences of repression of that trauma as the kidnapping is eventually “downgraded to … a brief period where there was a ‘dybbuk’ [a disruptive evil Jewish spirit] in the works. An inconvenience, a setback … a time things went wrong, like when Bernard’s appendix burst, or the Holocaust.”
The Fletchers believed the safety and survival they delighted in “was earned by them, a sort of hazard pay for what they endured”.
Brodesser-Akner has written that the idea for the novel was born 50 years ago, when her father’s friend, Jack Teich, was taken at gunpoint from his driveway “in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. Then he went on with his life, and that’s the part that haunts me.”
And so the kidnapping becomes the bugaboo that haunts all the Fletchers. After his release, Carl goes through the motions, showing up daily in his glass office atop the Fletcher factory. But his actions are robotic and stunted by pain. Even his factory, which constructs moulds for shipping, bleeds toxic waste into the soil. The family’s extraordinary wealth was built upon the chemical formula for polystyrene that his grandfather Zelig stole from his dying compatriot as they were both escaping the Nazis.
Wife Ruth’s focus becomes protecting his emotional health. Their eldest son, Nathan, invests in ridiculous amounts of insurance to protect himself against prospective disasters which never happen. Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, consumes anything – drugs, women, foodstuffs – to numb his perpetual terror. The kidnapping becomes the central event of every single one of Beamer’s failed screenplays.
Jenny, the only child born after the event, spends her life trying to separate herself from her family’s disturbed pathology, discovering that she is running in circles going nowhere. Nathan can’t challenge himself to rise above his present circumstances, fearing he will tempt the “dybbuk” and wreak havoc on his own family.
Beamer seeks a dominatrix to punish him to numb the pain of his epic failures. Jenny turns away from her privilege, seeking authenticity and meaning in socialism and union leadership, denying her inheritance of the family trauma.
Long Island Compromise grapples with the question of whether money offers true security from misfortune. Money has been a crutch for the Fletcher heirs, who each receive substantial monthly infusions of cash from the polluting family factory. Has this tainted money cushioned them from the harsh struggle for survival? Has wealth really protected the Fletchers from obscurity and annihilation? Accruing wealth was the American dream that lured their impoverished ancestors fleeing inquisitions, pogroms and gas chambers.
While the ransom money saved Carl Fletcher, the kidnapping transformed him into a muselmann, the living dead.
The Fletcher fortune also gave Carl’s heirs everything but their unique purpose. The dybbuk haunting the novel is that success often breeds failure and trauma is inherited in the genes. Money can pay ransoms but cannot still the heart, which yearns to be set free.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire, $37.99) is out now.
