Books: “Long Island Compromise” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Can a kidnapping change your life? (Admittedly, this is not a question most of us ask ourselves daily.) But it occasionally haunts the Fletchers, the protagonists of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s outrageously funny, sharp new novel “Long Island Compromise.”

The Fletcher saga begins with paterfamilias Zelig, who in 1942 escapes Nazi-occupied Poland and arrives in New York with nothing more than a formula for polyurethane in his pocket. With luck and pluck, he soon builds Consolidated Packing Solutions, a large factory in Queens. Eventually, the company makes millions, affording him and his wife Phyllis a luxurious lifestyle in the fictional community of Middle Rock (a thinly disguised Great Neck), Long Island.

Fast forward to 1980, when Zelig’s son Carl, who now manages the company after his father dies, is kidnapped and held for $250,000 in ransom, which the family pays. Carl is released but afterwards, he is never quite the same. Nor is his wife Ruth.

Fast forward again, to the three kids in adulthood. Every quarter, each of them receives nearly one million dollars from the factory’s earnings. As a result, they become quintessential underachievers, which doesn’t sit well with mom Ruth, a hardened cynic who grew up poor. “When you're born with money, you'll always be a rich girl, even if you lose all of it. If you’re raised with no money, you'll never feel rich,” she tells her daughter Jenny.

So how exactly do the children spend the family’s hard-earned dollars? First-born son Nathan, an overly cautious land-use lawyer, lives an upper-middle-class suburban life, builds an investment portfolio, but also becomes addicted to buying insurance, including—ironically—kidnapping insurance. Second son Bernard, nicknamed “Beamer,” schmoozes his way into Hollywood, makes a series of B-movie comedies that happen to involve kidnapping, and spends his money maintaining a Hollywood lifestyle for himself and his family—and feeding a series of addictions.

Their younger sister, Jenny, a socialist who studies economics at Yale, wants her father’s factory workers to unionize and donates her money to left-leaning causes. Jenny is embarrassed by her family’s wealth and sees “only folly in the Fletchers' capitalist existence. In her own house, the money sat with them at the dinner table, then watched TV with them in the living room, and part of what made the Fletchers boring and dumb, in her opinion, was that they never talked about it.”

A twist of fate, however, changes the narrative for all three children.

The moral of the story? While money can be a wonderful thing, it can also be a curse. In the case of the Fletchers, people born poor will struggle and be resourceful, whereas those born rich may just vegetate, never having to wonder when their next quarterly or monthly is coming from. As Beemer and Jenny see it, “the tide pool you're born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons.” Sound like “Succession?” You’re not wrong.

Brodesser-Akner, a writer for NYT Magazine, based her tale on the real-life kidnapping of a family friend on his way to his factory in Brooklyn. Other than that, the story is purely fictional. The author also wrote “Fleischman Is In Trouble,” a very funny novel that was turned into a Hulu series starring Jesse Eisenberg. I can’t wait for this one to be produced as well.

PS: if someone steals your copy of the book and holds it for ransom, pay whatever they want.

Like this review? Follow me at “What Does Aug Think?” at acsntn.substack.com. Thank you!