The Particular Ways That Being Rich Screws You Up
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise, tells the story of one American family burdened by their own wealth.
When a certain type of person reaches middle age without having achieved the level of professional recognition or personal happiness they feel they deserve, they’re apt to take a page from sociologists who study poverty and start searching for root causes, the source of what went wrong. These dissatisfied adults turn to their therapist: Was it their parents? Something else in their upbringing? All options are on the table—except, perhaps, those that locate the blame within.
For the three unhappy adult siblings at the center of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s exuberant and absorbing new novel, Long Island Compromise, the go-to explanation for the various failures and disappointments that underlie their seemingly successful—successful-ish—lives is an event that is both lurid and tragic. When they were very young, their father was kidnapped and held for ransom for five days, before being returned to the family—at least in body. Mentally, he was never the same.
The possibility exists, however, that for the children of Carl Fletcher, the kidnapping is just a convenient excuse. Perhaps their bigger problem is that they were born rich, really rich—rich enough to pay what is described as the third-largest ransom in U.S. history at the time ($250,000 in 1980 dollars), without batting an eye. As adults, the three children receive checks of between $500,000 and $750,000 a quarter, their share of the proceeds of the family’s business, which they have no part in, except insomuch as their grandfather started it and their father—ostensibly—runs it. (Really, his foreman does most of the work.) Regardless, having that much money might well mess with a person’s head.
Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, published in 2019, struck a cultural nerve, as did the television show that followed in 2022, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes. Like the novel, the show was hotly discussed, at least in certain circles. A witty, well-told, knowing story of affluent, college-educated urbanites and suburbanites discontented with their middle-aged lives, Fleishman seemed to speak primarily to affluent, college-educated urbanites and suburbanites who were discontented with their middle-aged lives. Long Island Compromise is a more ambitious book, a big, old-fashioned social novel, one that builds a complete (and only gently satirized) world from the ground up. Comprising immersive, tragicomic deep dives into the Fletchers’ personal pathologies and inner demons; a family history; and a detailed, often hilarious tour of the societal landscape in which each member of the family’s personality was honed, the decades-spanning novel seems to have taken inspiration simultaneously from Trollope, Jonathan Franzen, and Aristotle (“Man is a social animal”).
Long Island Compromise isn’t exactly a novel of ideas—at least not the kind where the characters engage in overt theorizing; that’s not Brodesser-Akner’s style. Pleasingly, its zippy narrative is itself a dramatization of the book’s guiding idea, which can be roughly boiled down to this: Some people—a lot of people—want more than anything to be rich, never mind that their riches, once obtained, are apt to turn those they purport to care most about in the world, their children, into helpless, entitled doofuses they inevitably view with contempt. (This only makes these people determined to secure even more money for their children, because, being so pathetic, they are more, rather than less, in need of help.) As a result, Long Island Compromise functions as a rather clever argument for a wealth tax or, at the very least, a much much steeper tax on inherited wealth than the one that is currently in place—i.e., none, at least not on the first $26 or so million for a married couple. (We can thank Donald Trump’s tax cut, passed in 2017, for more than doubling the amount that is exempt from taxation.) Brodesser-Akner gestures at this herself. In the novel, a hit television show called Family Business—written by the former best friend of Beamer, the middle Fletcher child—inspired “at least one piece of legislation regarding inheritance taxes.” It’s clear to everyone who knows them that the show is about the Fletchers.
Long Island is of course immense, both sociologically and geographically. The novel takes place in one tiny, demographically distinct corner of it, a fictional wealthy enclave called Middle Rock that is so central to the novel that it might be considered a character in its own right.
The people of Middle Rock have much in common. For one thing, most of them are Jewish (this was, according to the novel, the first suburb in the nation to reach the threshold of being 50 percent Jewish). Moreover, a significant percentage of its women’s noses “had been reshaped by the same plastic surgeon in Manhattan, a doctor known throughout Long Island for being able to coax something parenthesis-shaped” into a “dignified snub” (not, that is, the dissonant “ski slope that all the Jewish girls thought they wanted”). Middle Rock is a particular flavor of Jewish: bourgeois rather than bookish; less Upper West Side, more Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth’s scathing novella about wealthy suburban Jews in New Jersey. Like Roth, Brodesser-Akner is well aware of what makes a place like Middle Rock easy to mock—be it the tacky grandeur of some of its homes (“every third one had been razed to make way for something that looked like either a Frankenstein of architectural indecision or an effigy of an important building in another country”) or the provincialism of its inhabitants—but her portrait is laced with affection as well. She understands why some people choose this life, and although she raises an eyebrow, she doesn’t despise them for it.
The Fletchers are Middle Rock royalty, mostly because they are so rich but also because they have been there for several generations, about as long as it’s possible for most American Jewish families to have been anywhere in America, given that the majority of our forebears fled one or another 20th-century European horror. The patriarch, Zelig Fletcher, barely made it out of Poland after the Nazis invaded. The rest of his family was not so fortunate. Zelig brought with him from Europe a chemical formula, the basis for the product now known as Styrofoam. The polystyrene factory he established in Queens flourished almost beyond measure in an era when American manufacturers were (1) in need of just such a lightweight packing material, (2) existent, and (3) not subject to much environmental regulation, especially if their owner knew how to work a politician. And so the factory did well—never mind the “rainbow river” of pollutants it spewed into the groundwater.
A flush Zelig purchased prime Middle Rock real estate: a lush 16-acre waterfront estate that would come to encompass a stately white-brick main house, several caretaker cottages, a pool, a tennis court, a greenhouse, and access to the Sound. He married a formidable woman named Phyllis. When Zelig died, their son Carl took over the factory. Soon after following in his father’s professional footsteps, Carl married Ruth, a woman who is not only similar to Phyllis in disposition, but even looks remarkably like her—and not just because both women had their noses done by the same doctor (although they did).
Then, one morning while Ruth, newly pregnant with her third child, is giving the older two breakfast, Carl is snatched from just outside the family home. Although he is returned, five days of being bound, blindfolded, beaten, and berated leave Carl with undiagnosed PTSD. Alongside her mother-in-law/doppelgänger, Ruth devotes herself to the care of her husband, but otherwise life goes on for the children, Nathan, Bernard (“Beamer”), and Jenny, who was born seven months after Carl was abducted.
In the family lore, the fact of the kidnapping meant that the family had survived their allotted portion of suffering; having paid their dues, in terms of misfortune, they expect smooth sailing going forward. In fiction, such arrogance rarely goes unpunished, and Long Island Compromise is no exception. As they will discover, Nathan, Beamer, and Jenny’s real trial has little to do with the sensational event that both fascinated and frightened them their whole lives. It comes on much later, when they reach middle age. One day, they get the last news they ever expected to hear: The money has dried up. Those $500,000-plus deposits that simply appeared in their bank accounts four times a year? Gone, done, no more. The explanation is complicated—something-something private equity, the end of American manufacturing, a voided contract—but, really, the why or the how doesn’t much matter, compared with the fact of it. The Fletcher children have never been interested in the details of the business anyway.
When the blow falls, Nathan, the oldest of the three children, is a lawyer who lives with his wife and twin sons. Like his father, Carl, Nathan didn’t stray far from home: He lives in Middle Rock, near his parents and grandmother. One expects Nathan, a nervous Nellie, to have been conservative with his money, but it turns out that he has made some bad investment decisions.
We meet Beamer, Nathan’s younger brother, during a drug-fueled BDSM session (he has standing weekly appointments with two different and differently talented dominatrixes, we learn). Given what is being done to him, at his own request, Beamer comes off initially as grotesque, a character out of a crueler, more satirical novel. But Beamer has his reasons for being in that hotel room. A screenwriter who once co-wrote a trilogy of moderately successful action movies, he fears that his writing career is in the toilet. (The fact that his agent hasn’t returned his call for several days is not a good sign.) He also worries that his wife, a beautiful blond ex-actor named Noelle, is on the verge of leaving him. The dominatrixes are, like his drug use, part of an effort to keep himself from feeling too much or thinking about the things that are upsetting him. In context, it’s not exactly surprising to learn that he has blithely frittered away his money on a lavish lifestyle that seems largely designed to keep Noelle happy.
If Noelle does leave Beamer, the reader can’t help but suspect that Beamer’s mother, Ruth, will be partially to blame: Even two grandchildren into her son’s marriage, she remains furious that Beamer married the most shiksa-y shiksa he could find. Ruth’s reaction when Beamer calls to tell her he is engaged is typical: “Did you just say Albrecht?” she asks, when Beamer says Noelle’s last name. Because Noelle is standing right next to him, listening to his half of the conversation, he pretends for the sake of her feelings that his mother is reacting favorably to the news:
“Amazing, right?” Beamer said, his voice full of the invented reflected excitement of his family.
“Is she … she’s a German?” He could see his mother, standing in the kitchen, her hand on her hip, wearing her old black-velvet robe, her lips tight and her nostrils flaring.
“She’s from Maine. She reminds me of you! You’re going to love her!”
“I lived too long,” his mother said.
“We’re thinking of doing it at the beach!” Beamer said.
“Noelle Albrecht. Noelle. Did we not give you enough? Did we not love you enough? Do you need more attention? Is that it?”
Though Ruth is being sarcastic, it’s actually not a bad question. Money notwithstanding, another possible explanation for the Fletcher kids’ unhappiness as adults is that their parents were simply bad parents, distant and unloving. One night, after he spends time with his 4-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter, Beamer is struck by the tenderness he feels for them. He could still feel
his daughter’s kiss burning through his cheek for the next few minutes and tried not to think about how he was raised to think that it was hard to love your children, that it took enormous effort to focus on them and show them that they were special—that even if you could pull that off, what a burden it was to you, the parent. Actually, he thought, for the millionth time, it was quite easy.
Beamer, though, has less reason to complain about being unloved than does his younger sister, Jenny, even if complaining isn’t really her style. (Icy silence communicated through long absences is more her bag.) Ruth didn’t want to have Jenny at all. In the months after the kidnapping, Ruth contemplated abortion, but couldn’t bring herself to go as far as making the appointment. Instead, she did what she could to induce a miscarriage. To no avail. Jenny was born seven months later.
Growing up, Jenny was an academic prodigy, a Model UN champion, the star of the basketball team, a winner of science-fair gold medals, and a gifted actor who stole the show at school productions. But Jenny and her mother always clashed, about Jenny’s lack of interest in the kind of pursuits her mother thought she should be interested in as a girl (makeup, shopping, getting a nose job). Jenny couldn’t wait to leave Middle Rock the minute she graduated from high school. Naturally, given her talents, great things were expected of her.
To the surprise of pretty much everyone in Middle Rock, including Jenny herself, she became academically and socially paralyzed while an undergraduate at Brown and never quite recovered. When the money dries up, she is in her late 30s, single and working in New Haven, Connecticut, as a labor organizer, a job she once, briefly, felt a passion for but that seems to have become something she now does mostly from habit. This can also be said of her choice to give her quarterly cash infusions to various charities—something that may have begun as a generous act of self-sacrifice but after a while feels more like a fuck-you to her family and especially her mother.
Thus, none of the Fletchers is well situated when the cash stops coming. Which means that they finally have something in common with the less well-off people who, even in a town as “fanc-ee”—as one character from a less-wealthy Long Island town puts it—as Middle Rock, have orbited them for decades. Some of these people turn out to resent the Fletchers more than they ever realized. But I won’t elaborate, because Long Island Compromise is ingeniously plotted, its various storylines building toward several extremely satisfying plot twists—by which I mean the best kind of twists, ones that are earned, that make the reader simultaneously gasp in surprise and want to hit oneself because, in retrospect, they make so much sense that there’s no excuse for not having seen them coming.
Because Long Island Compromise is so explicitly about American Jewish life, Brodesser-Akner will inevitably be compared to Philip Roth. But Roth’s sympathy for characters who don’t greatly resemble Philip Roth—who aren’t his avatar—tends to be limited and fleeting. Brodesser-Akner is a more generous storyteller.
She is more similar to Jonathan Franzen, and not only because the Fletchers share basic characteristics with the Lamberts of his 2001 novel, The Corrections (a family of three kids, two older boys and a girl, the latter of whom once seemed to show the most potential but has since flamed out). Like Franzen’s, Brodesser-Akner’s sympathies are broad and deep, and like him, she is a person on whom nothing is lost, who can effortlessly take in a room, noting everything from the clothes people are wearing to their deepest fears and most annoying social tic. She is also, like him, a sly and stylish writer, adept at using comedy and clever comedic framing to plumb the depths of her characters’ misery. Only rarely do her characterizations falter. Jenny’s character arc is, for example, thinner than those of her brothers, possessing such a paucity of events or phases that it’s hard to fully credit. (No matter how much pleasure a person takes in annoying her mother or thwarting expectations, days are long, and after 15 or 20 years of adulthood, one usually develops some additional motives or desires as well, if only to stave off boredom.) But even with this caveat, the broad strokes of Jenny’s character feel true, and in a novel of such scope, this amounts to a minor criticism.
[Read: ‘What is Jesse Eisenberg doing here, saying these things I wrote?’]
To say that we live in an age of autofiction has become something of a cliché, but any discussion of contemporary fiction must acknowledge that many recent novels that aren’t technically autofiction are nevertheless influenced by it. Many eschew fiction’s traditional task of bringing to life a multiplicity of characters and a setting; instead their main character presents more as a free-floating psyche, barely tethered to a specific setting, whose observations about the world are alone deemed to be worthy of the reader’s attention. Sometimes this works—in the hands of a sufficiently talented writer, the protagonist’s observations are indeed interesting enough to carry an entire novel. Often, however, the lack of other voices or true sociality results in tonal homogeneity—a flatness and lack of color—that feels as if it’s being passed off as profound, a declaration about the world, rather than the result of an author’s unwillingness to inhabit another’s mind or create a fictional universe.
With its cacophony of characters and voices, Long Island Compromise could not be more different. It conjures a world brimming with color. Some of it is as garish as the houses of Middle Rock, but much of it isn’t. The potentially corrosive nature of wealth has rarely been explored with such humanity, through a prism of characters who, ridiculous as they often are, are anything but soap-opera villains. On the contrary, the Fletchers mostly mean well. This makes the fact that they not infrequently act like entitled jerks far more painful—and far more interesting.
*Lead-image sources: GraphicaArtis / Getty; Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty; Art Images / Getty; Elena Peremet / Getty.