Long Island Compromise

February 1, 2024

Brodesser-Akner, the best-selling author of the NBA-longlisted Fleishman Is in Trouble, returns with a story about the lasting impact of trauma on a family as wealthy businessman Carl is kidnapped and held for ransom. He's returned to his family, but 40 years later, it's clear no one is over the incident. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 20, 2024
Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he’s still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There’s Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who’s too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they’ve all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner’s latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe’s novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. This is a comedic feast. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
After the paterfamilias is kidnapped, nobody in this family is ever the same. "Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?" Of course we do. So begins the glorious festival of schadenfreude that is this second book by Brodesser-Akner, who was apparently just getting started with her blockbuster debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019)--she hits it out of the park with this much more ambitious follow-up. As the children of Carl Fletcher joke among themselves, discussing a TV show that's like a Jewish version of Succession, "What Jew our age wants the family business?" Well, it's a styrofoam factory, not a media conglomerate, for one thing, and for another, these three broken people have been stewed in the juice of a terrible event in their family history: In 1980, when Nathan and Beamer were small and Jenny was in utero, their father was kidnapped out of the driveway and held for several days. He was released upon payment of the third-largest domestic ransom to that time, $250,000. While two of the perps were convicted, the majority of the loot was not recovered, a fact that Carl is still thinking about at his twin grandsons' bar mitzvah decades later. "White people problems" are generally those that can be fixed by judicious spending, but no amount of money can fix what's wrong with the Fletchers; as the knowing narrator points out, "There is no post. There's only trauma." To which Carl's wife, Ruth (what a great character), might snort, "Dr. Phil over here." Indeed, for all the trauma, there are laugh-out-loud moments galore. And the title? It starts out coined by teenagers as something dirty, but as the book progresses, one comes to see that even the crime at the center of the book is a (very sad and twisted) version of the Long Island compromise. A great American Jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth. A triumph.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024
For several terrifying days in 1980, Carl Fletcher, head of his family factory, is kidnapped and tortured, until his wife, Ruth, drops $250,000 on a JFK baggage claim, per kidnappers' instruction, and Carl is returned. (An author's note explains that the crime is based on the high-profile 1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich, whose family intersected with the author's, but the similarities end there.) Everyone is traumatized, but at least the ransom was easily enough obtained: the Fletchers are fabulously wealthy thanks to Carl's late father, Zelig, who fled the Holocaust and worked his way up the American ladder producing Styrofoam, that ingenious (and alas, highly toxic) insulator. Brodesser-Akner's (Fleishman Is in Trouble, 2019) second novel unfolds through the present-day lives of Carl and Ruth's grown children: charismatic screenwriter Beamer, nervous attorney Nathan, and bristly labor organizer Jenny. Having been roundly pilloried by her kids, Ruth, too, gets a say, but Carl is barely there. This is more complicated than Fleishman, and messy to the point of unwieldy at times--sort of like the Fletchers themselves. But Brodesser-Akner is a steady, imaginative, insightful writer, and there are riotous passages, haunting dybbuks, and unseen twists that make it thoroughly discussable. Readers will get lost and found in its universe of wealth, family, faith, and other fallible securities.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Following the runaway success of Fleishman Is in Trouble, in print and on TV, this, too, is already being adapted into a streaming series.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024

The Fletcher family of posh suburban Long Island is in serious disarray in Brodesser-Akner's heartbreaking and hilarious second novel (after Fleishman Is in Trouble). Forty years after wealthy businessman Carl Fletcher was kidnapped, his grown children and long-suffering wife still feel the reverberations. Screenwriter Beamer is failing spectacularly while trying to conceal his massive drug use and sadomasochistic dalliances from his wife; oldest brother Nathan, fearful of everything, is stuck on a low rung at a law firm; sister Jenny wanders through life, taking up causes and guises in a fruitless effort to dissociate herself from the family. Observing her offspring flail and fail, all while offering witty and despairing commentary, is Ruth, whose own dreams were dashed when she had to tend to her fragile husband after he was returned home, having spent a week in captivity. A cast of dozens support and supplant the Fletcher family in this novel. Every story is keenly observed yet sympathetic, whether it's the origin myth of grandfather Zelig, Long Island real estate maneuverings, over-the-top themed bar and bat mitzvahs, or the skewering of Hollywood politics. VERDICT Generational trauma has never been so funny as when Brodesser-Akner writes it. This book is a must-read for those who like witty, observational novels, family sagas, and sharp dialogue and characterization.--Liz French

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.