Fans of the novel and Hulu miniseries Fleishman Is in Trouble will find many familiar themes in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, Long Island Compromise. In both stories, a well-off Jewish family laments, aloud and in seething silence, that money doesn’t buy happiness. In both, men and women run counter to type, with wives calling the shots on money and husbands finding lonely joy in their kids. And both novels feature many, many scenes of anonymous, frantic, and sometimes humiliating sex.
If Toby Fleishman is in trouble for not appreciating his wife’s side of their failing marriage, adult siblings Nathan, Beamer, and Jenny Fletcher are compromised because one morning when they are six, four, and in utero, their father, Carl, is kidnapped from their driveway, held hostage in a dank basement, and returned only after their mother leaves $250,000 in cash on an airport baggage carousel. The Fletchers respond as any emotionally stunted family would: they tell Carl to get over it. Or, as his mother, Phyllis, instructs him repeatedly: “This happened to your body. This did not happen to you.”
Such separation of body and soul, or the compartmentalization of the self, is a tension that besets three generations of Fletchers. Zelig, Carl’s father, escaped the Nazis of Poland to found a prosperous Styrofoam factory in Queens, but he carries conflicting versions of the story that enabled his success. Ruth, Carl’s wife, trades emotional honesty for financial security, but finds herself squeezed between her domineering mother-in-law, Phyllis, and her gritless children. These children — Nathan, Beamer and Jenny — chase the kind of satisfaction they could never give their parents: they variously attempt prudence and promiscuity, drugs and defiance, and creativity and charity.
The Fletchers’ travails are punctuated by Brodesser-Akner’s wry wit. There’s the friend whose last name becomes Messinger-Schlesinger; there’s the rehab facility whose restaurant has a Michelin star; and there’s Beamer’s inability to write a Hollywood script that doesn’t feature a kidnapping.
Midway through the novel, the narrator (who, just like in Fleishman, turns out to be a friend of the family) remarks that “All families are a Bible story unto themselves.” Which begs the question: which Bible story are the Fletchers? Do they symbolize the intractable intergenerational trauma of Isaac and Ishmael? The toxic sibling angst of Joseph and his brothers?
One might argue that the Fletchers’ Bible-sized sin lies in forgetting what Jews know best: that when there is tragedy and trauma, we must talk about it. Examine the injustice in great detail; pick apart the suffering; retell it from generation to generation. Don’t shut it down, hiding behind a stiff upper lip and stony denial. Because such compartmentalization compromises the kids.
E. Kinney Zalesne, a former Microsoft executive, is a strategy consultant in Washington, DC. She serves on the board of the National Library of Israel’s American affiliate, NLI USA; and was the collaborator on the bestselling book, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes (Twelve, 2007).
