title: Long Island Compromise by: Brodesser-Akner, Taffy published: 2024-07-09 read: 2024-08-16 preview

DO YOU WANT to hear a story with a terrible ending? On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, Carl Fletcher, one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb where we grew up, was kidnapped from his driveway on his way to work.

This is how this family saga book opens. And goes on, strongly, for the next 500+ pages. Not a page where the story isn’t gripping, the writing isn’t inviting. I love this book from the first to the last sentence. Reason enough to also get Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, which was already filmified. This one will be, too.

OK, the story. This Jewish family, the Fletchers, consists of grandpa (long dead) who started the styrofoam factory grandma Phyllis who is there till the end but dies half-way, mother Ruth, father Carl, and the children Beamer, Nathan, and Jenny.

The book opens with the kidnapping. It closes with it. And is present all the time. That’s what kidnappings do, probably.

For those agents had perfunctorily sniffed around for women and car accidents and nervous breakdowns, almost out of politeness, but they had taken one look at this house—the largest on a block of extremely robbable homes, the deck that reached over the Long Island Sound like the Sound was their own personal swimming pool, their own personal swimming pool, the crescent driveway, the modern appliances, the marble bathrooms, the velvet couches, a Jaguar XJ6 (Ruth’s) in the driveway.

Beamer, Nathan, and Jenny (unborn during the kidnapping) have a constant need to re-enact, or distance, or connect to family because of what happened. Carl’s mind never returns. Ruth is permanently everywhere and nowhere.

As in Beamer’s way to cope, through sex and drugs excesses, hiding those from his society wife Noelle:

As Noelle came to define his status quo, he now sought the opposite of Noelle: messy where Noelle was neat; dirty where Noelle was groomed; a sphincter that was warm and purple and inviting where Noelle’s was pink like a ballerina, hairless, puckered in rebuke, and just about sealed shut.

Nathan has a job but is not successful:

Nathan hadn’t been fired—not exactly, anyway. Or at least not formally; at least not yet. He was on what was technically called “unpaid administrative leave” while he waited for a panel of his superiors to convene to determine the level of discipline he’d earned when he’d totally accidentally and yet somehow intentionally bribed a government official.

Ruth sometimes deplores her life choices, don’t we all:

Dale picked a fight with her on the ride home that night. She couldn’t remember now exactly what it was about—probably the usual fight about him wanting to marry immediately and her wanting to wait till graduation—except that she saw clearly that he was asking for a reaffirmation of her love in all the ways that men do, meaning indirectly.

Yes. We do. And we know that women are right, but don’t act on it to keep up appearances:

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

(I skipped Jenny’s story, leaving it to you to discover the smartest, most distanced of the family – and as important as any of the others.)

And so we follow the lives of each of the characters, chapter by chapter. Stories so full, so real, that it’s as fascinating to be in one, as move to the other. Since they all connect. I often use the term ‘character development’, well, here that’s done on steroids.

The author is kind enough to give us all information on the kidnapping, and in the end we can make a decent guess as to how it came to be.

Where are your skeletons?

Read the book, people.