Read by Edoardo Ballerina
15 hours, 23 minutes
Published July 2024 by Random House Publishing
Publisher's Summary:
“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.
But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, 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 fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.
Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
My Thoughts:
I saw this one on numerous best-of-2024 lists (and have heard great things about Brodesser-Akner's Fleishman Is In Trouble) so I requested it from the library. It ended up being a read/listen combination because I struggled with this one and my loan timed out.
The book opens with the kidnapping and return of Carl Fletcher and the immediate aftermath. It's fast paced and drew me in immediately. And then we moved to sections about each of his children as grown adults. To say they were screwed up is an understatement. Reading Beamer's story was, for me, very uncomfortable and a little disturbing and I almost gave up on the book before I finished reading his part. If something bad could possibly happen, it did; but each of the kids (and their mother and grandmother) brought a lot of it on themselves. I began to feel less and less sorry for these people. I get that their lives had been irrevocably changed with the kidnapping, but I couldn't help but feel that at least one of them might have overcome it all.
There was a part of me that really hoped that things wouldn't work out for them. That they would all have to learn how to get real jobs and live like normal people. But, of course, rich people hardly ever have the roof fall entirely in on them and this story is no exception. The thing that saved this one for me was that Brodesser-Akner had a couple of surprises up her sleeve that totally took me by surprise and I always do like a book that can surprise me.
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