WORDS BY ANNIE CARTY
There is a dybbuk in Long Island Compromise. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a restless spirit condemned to linger among the living and cause persistent chaos. In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sophomore novel, that presence is not supernatural, rather material. It is wealth and all of its consequences, both good and bad. It is the thing that will not leave the Fletcher family alone, no matter how much they spend it, squander it, or ignore it.
The novel opens with a kidnapping. Thirty pages of action; a wealthy businessman snatched from his driveway, the ransom paid by his pregnant wife. Yet what matters is not the event itself, but what radiates outward from it. Decades after their father’s abduction, the lives of the three Fletcher children, now adults, demonstrate how one event can metastasise into lifelong trauma.
Inspired by the real-life kidnapping of Jack Teich, Carl Fletcher is abducted and, after five days, is subsequently returned, but changed. Encouraged by his mother to compartmentalise, telling him, “This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in,”¹ the family reorganises itself around what cannot be said or resolved.
What makes Long Island Compromise uniquely refreshing is its unflinching embrace of unlikeable characters, with no effort made to rectify their flaws. Every character in this book is either snobby, perverted, intolerable, or a combination of the three, all the way down to the side characters who appear in the tangents of the novel. Brodesser-Akner does not sacrifice truth in the pursuit of likeability. Instead, she insists that characters need not be pleasant in order to be compelling, and that novels are better read for verisimilitude rather than moral comfort.
Nathan, the eldest, is a lawyer crippled by anxiety. After a series of bad investments, he sits on the edge of financial ruin, cushioned only by the Fletcher fortune. Beamer, the middle child, is a screenwriter addicted to addiction, moving from BDSM to drugs to alcohol with professional dedication. Every script he produces features a kidnapping, returning to the same plot with manic obsession. Jenny, the youngest and only daughter, recoils from her family’s wealth. She gives away as much of her million-dollar quarterly allowance as possible, but her socialist beliefs are not apparent in her still-privileged lifestyle. Their mother, who herself grew up poor, resents the spoilt rich kids she has raised.
Reminiscent of the works of Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth, this novel examines the role of wealth in the American Dream, and what happens when that dream has already been achieved. Carl’s father, Zelig, chased that dream after he fled Poland in 1942, and by the modern day, the Fletchers are “extraordinarily, absurdly, kidnappingly rich”²: the kind of money that should be enough to ward off any dybbuks and provide the family with the stability Zelig sought when arriving in New York. Instead, it makes a target of Carl, and after his abduction, the family’s trust in that stability is shattered.
Wealth, in this novel, is both a blessing and a curse. It provides comfort, while also damning the family. It enables avoidance, allowing the children to drift into adulthood without ambition or urgency, underachieving despite their riches. Brodesser-Akner asks: does money protect you, or ruin you?
Her narration is hyper aware, darkly funny, and intentionally uncomfortable. The tangents, and there are many tangents, never feel indulgent. Instead, they sharpen the satire, propelling the novel towards the terrible ending the reader is warned about in the very first line. Their fates are mirrored in the story of Glenn Finkelstein, a family friend who runs a scam selling duplicate cemetery plots to their community in order to pay for his daughter’s private education. He chases money up until he is caught and subsequently killed in a prison transfer accident, yet the Fletchers do not learn from this.
Long Island Compromise is a book about inheritance. From family wealth to generational trauma, Taffy Brodesser-Akner suggests that money cannot save you from what came before you. If anything, it proves even more destructive. Tolstoy famously wrote, “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”³ This novel proposes the opposite. No matter the dybbuk that brings it, the pain suffered by one generation will linger, and no amount of money can truly keep anything at bay.