Long Island Compromise

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An exhilarating novel about one American family and the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, Town & Country, New York Post, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Parade, Kirkus Reviews

"The best book about America I've read lately . . . The novel concerns being Jewish, being an immigrant, class, family, wealth, and how that wealth can disfigure people. It's all terribly funny, which always helps."--David Sedaris for Time, "25 Books That Capture This American Moment"

"Joins the pantheon of great American novels."--Los Angeles Times
"Exuberant and absorbing . . . a big old-fashioned social novel."--The Atlantic

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, beaten, and ransomed. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, and the family moves on, comforted in the realization that if their money was what endangered them, it is also what assured their safety.

But forty years later, it's clear that nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has secretly sought closure for decades, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. Their three grown children aren't doing much better: Nathan's chronic anxiety keeps him from advancing at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything--drugs, food, women--to numb his terror; and Jenny is so bent on proving that she's not a product of her family's pathology that she has come to define it. When they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, they must face questions about the part wealth has played in their lives' successes and failures and confront the trauma that has stunted each of them.

With depth and surprising hilarity, Long Island Compromise winds through one family's history, all the way to the outrageous present, confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, old wives' tales, evil eyes, achievement, boredom, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta blockers, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - Belletrist Book Club Pick

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593133498
• ISBN13: 9780593133491
• Release Date: July 2024
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The Weight We Carry

A single event. Five days. A ransom paid. And then, everyone expected life to go on. Long Island Compromise begins with the 1980 kidnapping of Carl Fletcher, a wealthy Long Island factory owner, and quietly, devastatingly traces what that event costs his family across generations. Carl's mother offered the defining dismissal: this happened to your body, not to you. She was wrong. Carl was never the same, and neither were the people who loved him. Brodesser-Akner has written a deeply character-driven exploration of the Jewish-American experience, the pursuit of the good life, the weight of ancestral history, whether acknowledged or not, and the gap between the life we wish to show the world and the interior life we actually inhabit. This is a novel about what the American dream extracts in payment, and how trauma moves silently through families long after everyone has agreed to move on.