Long Island Compromise

In her much-ballyhooed 2019 debut novel Fleishman Is In Trouble, the New York Times’ expert celebrity profiler Taffy Brodesser-Akner told a story based, at least in part, on her life as a journalist and mother. She again looks close to home for inspiration in her follow-up, Long Island Compromise. The book begins with the kidnapping of the patriarch of a wealthy Long Island family that closely mirrors one that occurred near the author’s childhood home. But Brodesser-Akner is less interested in how the terrifying ordeal affects the kidnapee than how it shapes the lives of his three aimless and spoiled children. Carl Fletcher’s kids inherit both his trauma and his money, earned from an ecologically disastrous styrofoam factory. A different child narrates each section of the novel—Beamer is a drug-addled Hollywood screenwriter who can’t stop penning films about kidnappings; Nathan, the overly cautious eldest child, is frittering away the family’s money buying insurance for every aspect of their lives; and their younger sister, Jenny, is a self-loathing socialist who rejects her inheritance only to find herself hiding, jobless, in their parents’ multimillion-dollar Manhattan townhouse. The juxtaposition of misfortune and privilege makes for compelling drama, and the book is full of laugh-out-loud moments, like when a friend of the family goes on a paleo-esque diet in which he drinks no water and eats deer meat.

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