Long Island Compromise

I wanted to read this because I’d absolutely loved Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but I didn’t like Long Island Compromise nearly as much.

Long Island Compromise starts out with the direct warning that this is a story with a terrible ending, and then explains how the the father of a wealthy family is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the book’s not a thriller or a mystery, it’s the story of how this kidnapping creates a trauma that ripples out through the family, and also how this trauma is the result of the previous generation’s traumas and the previous generation’s choices.

Usually, I really enjoy this kind of family saga, but this sort of missed the mark for me. Carl, the kidnapped father, has 3 children, who are all dysfunctional in different ways, exacerbated by the kidnapping, but because the dysfunctions are all so extreme, it’s hard to take the characters seriously enough to root for anyone.

There’s an intriguing thread about the oldest son, Nathan, and how his marriage mirrors his parents’ marriage, which mirrored his father’s parents’ marriage, and there’s another intriguing question about Nathan’s wife’s personal compromises of wealth and religion. But these are overshadowed by his brother Beamer’s OTT sex and pills addictions. I sort of enjoyed the meta layer of one sibling taking over the narrative, just as he’d taken all the space in the family, but the excessive fetishes and repeated drug trips made it hard to take the character seriously and overshadowed the parts of the family story that I was more invested in.

There’s more of this intriguing mirroring in the secondary stories, but it doesn’t quite become an ensemble story. I enjoyed the local history digressions, especially the feeling of generational curses from all sides,  but these ultimately felt like digressions, not stories or background info for a main story. There’s an interesting theme about basement secrets (the old country, the kidnapping, the cracked foundation) but it didn’t quite resolve for me.

Despite the opening warning that this is going to be a sad ending and the characters with extreme self-destruction, there was somehow an overall atmosphere that the Fletchers were so cocooned in wealth that they’d be protected from any really negative consequences. I think because there was so much self-destructive behavior, I stopped worrying that mistakes would have consequences. I don’t think it’s 100% the money, I’ve enjoyed family sagas about wealthy families and their inheritance and trust issues before. The Heirs and The Nest are both fascinating family stories about what’s going to happen to the family wealth. Some part of the removal from consequences is really good — the author describes the grandchildren of privilege so well, and how they really didn’t experience any negative consequences. This makes an interesting and thoughtful contrast to the harsh survival in the old country, and the more working-class people who married in to the Fletchers, but that padding of wealth does bleed over into reducing the book’s tension. There’s a subplot about the family losing all their money, but something about it just didn’t ring true for me.  As they discussed their missing deposits or losing the factory that first made the family rich, I wasn’t as much as worried for the characters as I was waiting for the dramatic eleventh-hour reversal of fortune that was so clearly coming. (I had the pacing of the reversal right, but not the actual events, personally I thought one of anxious Nathan’s 10,000 insurance policies was about to come in really handy here.)

The ending feels rushed and unfinished. There’s kind of a dream sequence which didn’t match the style of the rest of the novel for me, and then there’s not really a resolution of most of the other arcs. This was particularly frustrating to me, because I liked most of the secondary characters and minor arcs (Alyssa! Max! The weirdos on the city council!) a great deal.

There were a lot of scenes and subplots I liked in Long Island Compromise. There were a few moments I loved! So many telling details! But the unevenness left me with a feeling that this wasn’t that this was a just-fine novel, but that I was reading a rough draft of a truly brilliant book.