Taffy Brodesser-Akner Knows Farkakte Families

If “The Great Gatsby” is the Great Long Island Novel of the 20th century, the competition for the 21st-century title is on with the publication of “Long Island Compromise” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Akner, the bestselling author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and writer of memorable profiles for the New York Times, gives readers 400-or-so easily turnable pages in which she spins out a Jonathan Franzen-esque epic about the Fletchers, a Jewish American family centered spiritually and geographically on Long Island. Over the course of three generations, they make compromises with the universe, but rarely with one another. The “Compromise” of the title, or one of them, is a sexual negotiation in Douglaston that explores what it means to be “good” and the silly rules we make up for ourselves then skirt. The result of that compromise gives nobody the complete satisfaction they want, but it yields a pleasurable and original story.

If you liked “Fleishman,” rejoice. “Long Island Compromise” is even better. It’s more absorbing and sweeping, introducing with varying levels of intimacy the entire Fletcher mishpacha whereas “Fleishman” largely limited itself to an unhappy pair of exes. “Compromise” is a book of bigger ideas and themes than “Fleishman,” including inherited trauma, the inescapability of identity, capitalism, commodity culture and environmental politics along with a timely reminder of the depth and toll of antisemitism in America.

The story’s straightforward. The Fletchers are loaded, the wealthiest family in the wealthy fictional enclave of Middle Rock, Long Island, “the shining realization of the Jewish American dream.” Carl, the patriarch and son of a Holocaust survivor-turned-successful-factory-owner, is kidnapped by antisemites until his wife, Ruth, delivers “the third highest domestic ransom ever” to secure his freedom. Their young sons are scarred forever and their daughter, in utero at the time, doesn’t escape the kidnapping’s afterlife either. When Carl is returned after five days, covered in his own urine and vomit, his controlling mother, Phyllis, tells him, “Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in.” But it turns out kidnapping is uncompartmentalizable. Carl lives in a haze of antidepressants and denial for the rest of his days, “an automaton” and the fragile fulcrum on which the Fletchers’ stability precariously balances.

Akner uses the perspective-shifting idiom that made “Fleishman” either indelible or gimmicky to stronger effect here, inhabiting the psyches of a horde of Fletchers and telling each of their stories in succession. First there’s Bernard, who goes by “Beamer” — the high school stud and NYU film grad who uses his trust fund and a talented friend’s creativity to make a place for himself in Hollywood. But Beamer has zero good ideas, a boatload of baggage and a drug problem. He pitches fictional stories of kidnappings to anyone who’ll listen, and by the end, few will.

Beamer’s insecurity and desire for validation and social mobility lead him to marry Noelle Albrecht, the ne plus ultra goy. (“Is she … she’s a German?” his mother asks. “Did we not give you enough? Did we not love you enough?”) If the work of Franzen, who Akner profiled for the NYT Magazine, influenced the scale and structure of “Compromise,” it’s Philip Roth who’s responsible for Beamer’s antecedent in assimilation: the Swede from “American Pastoral.” Another athletic suburban Jewish boy-cum-WASP-aspirant who disappoints his mother by marrying a once-beautiful shiksa (the Swede’s wife was a former pageant queen; Beamer’s a one-and-done actress), Beamer, like the Swede, reminds us that clichés are clichés for a reason: they’re so often true. The Jewish man who marries a gentile with perfect teeth and a pointless pedigree, “his very own Mayflower to take him to a new world,” will be familiar to serious readers, light readers and non-readers with eyes. The motivations that lead to these unions are as predictable as their outcomes. At least Beamer complicates his with an expensive BDSM fetish including a sad-funny kidnapping kink that’s satisfied by his steady, gap-toothed dominatrix. Beamer’s a definitively deviant Swede, and Akner imbues his tragedy with comedy. He hits rock bottom when he collapses, blitzed, on the doorstep of the man he’s been stalking: Mandy Patinkin.

On the topic of clichés, there’s also Nathan, the play-it-safe firstborn who despite risk-aversion that’s tantamount to a pathology, proves unbelievably gullible and ends up handing over his wad to an obvious securities fraudster. Finally, there’s Jenny, the Fletcher who wasn’t yet born at the time of the kidnapping. Indefatigably brilliant Jenny could do anything, but chooses to do nothing. Hers is the cliché of the ennuied trust-funder who gives away their inheritance knowing they’ll never starve, ostensibly out of social conscience, but at least partially to piss off their parents. Look at another of this summer’s page-turners, Teddy Winter’s “The Winner,” for a different version of the trust fund-rebel without a convincing cause.

Akner’s use of recognizable types doesn’t detract from the story; it gives the Fletchers a uniting, legible mishegas. The adult Fletcher kids are united not only by the trauma of their father’s kidnapping, but also by the extreme wealth into which they were born, and it’s unclear which was more destabilizing. Akner’s said she “wanted to write a book about money” and she has. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” would complement a reading of “Compromise”. While the exact cause of their inner tumult isn’t perfectly clear, their inability to competently function in the world is. Any of these believably messed-up adult kids could easily cause the total collapse of the Fletcher clan. It’s the questions of who, where, when and how that keep “Compromise” churning.

Akner’s studied attention to character and observational acumen make sense given her background in profile writing. She’s from an Orthodox Jewish family and is also expert in Yiddishisms and Jewish touches: a Hadassah bowling league comes up, as does a shtender. One that was new to me and central to “Compromise” is the folkloric dybbuk — “a miserable soul that cannot progress to a heavenly rest and instead stays on Earth and takes over someone else’s body” causing mischief. Carl’s father, Zelig, would say “there’s a dybbuk in the works” if cables started snapping at his factory. There’s a major dybbuk in the works of the Fletcher family and part of the suspense is figuring out what and where it is.

There are some surprises mingled with the tropes here, mostly at the book’s end, including a restrained, longburn love story involving the family lawyer. But the heavy foreshadowing in the book’s expository section is a tip-off that things aren’t as they seem. “Compromise’ opens in a pre-lapsarian time, the 1980s, with Carl patting his Product 19-eating sons’ heads before heading to the factory he inherited. It’s a period when the “weather was still generally straightforward,” though we later learn that Carl’s work, which provided a bottomless ATM for the Fletchers, was simultaneously hastening our planet’s environmental collapse. Pre-kidnapping Carl kisses Ruth goodbye in their suburban kitchen, “same as always.” In fiction as in life, a routinized existence is not only dull, it’s deceiving.

The Fletcher factory makes styrofoam for packaging. It’s based on a chemical formula Zelig brought to America from Europe in a trauma that’s revealed in the final pages of “Compromise” from which Zelig never recovered. That trauma and others infect the Fletcher family root to branch. It’s like styrofoam, which releases carcinogens into the environment that take hundreds of years to decompose. And styrofoam is as money to the Fletchers; it promises protection but it’s toxic.

As Carl’s story ends, he scoffs at the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Anyone who named it that didn’t really understand it. There is no post. There’s only trauma. Over and over. Time moves on, but you stay there forever. No wonder there was no treatment. How do you treat what is now called your life?”

The inescapability of the past isn’t new to Long Island fiction. When Fitzgerald wrote in 1922 about the impossibility of the American Dream for a low-caste boy from North Dakota despite all his new money, I doubt he imagined an observant Jewish woman would be updating it a hundred years later as a reflection not only on maximalist consumerism, but on the still-fresh topic of assimilation. Isn’t that what Gatsby was doing too? Trying to break through a class ceiling, like the Swede and Beamer, and hoping enough money would protect him, like Ruth and Zelig and Phyllis?

Did it make all of them less vulnerable or more?

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as “Gatsby” famously ends. While there’s no green light in Middle Rock, there is a lighthouse, which Phyllis charitably worked to restore and which Jenny looks out upon as she, the final Fletcher in Middle Rock, leaves “for good.”