Long Island Compromise explores the downsides of wealth

Fleishman is in Trouble was one of the funniest novels of 2020, and it catapulted Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times journalist, into the spotlight with a TV series two years later. Long Island Compromise is a rollicking family saga written with the same sardonic wit. It is centered around a wealthy family living in a suburb of Long Island, who owe their fortune to the late patriarch, a Jewish European émigré who set up a successful factory making polystyrene foam moulds. There’s a backstory to this, which we learn later, but his indomitable widow and his son Carl’s wife Ruth rule the roost. At the beginning, Carl is kidnapped, then returned traumatized, and the implications of this violent act affect Ruth and their children Nathan, Beamer and Jenny.

Brodesser-Akner can spin an excellent yarn with intelligence and wit. She is very much a post-modern writer, using brackets to expound on details in gossipy, amusing asides, such as telling us what Carl’s secretary thought when he didn’t turn up for work on the day he was kidnapped.

The characterization of Nathan and Beamer are sources of much hilarity, and although pushed to the point of parody, they are elevated to heights of comic genius by surreal touches, such as Beamer’s obsession with procuring the actor Mandy Patinkin for his lame, cliché-ridden screenplay. The author is master of the scathing put-down:

Beamer, after a storied high school career in which he relieved nearly a full quarter of his class’s virginities, became a moderately successful screenwriter, most notably of a trilogy of action movies that are in constant replay on certain basic cable channels (and sometimes the pay ones, but only the less prestigious ones, and only late at night).

The asides are as delicious:

Ludmilla the housekeeper and Paulette the nanny were bustling around… trying to read the tea leaves of their mistress’s absence in order to anticipate her mood.

And: “Ludmilla made her face into the Slavic stone that she had trained it to be.”

Only slightly let down only by a mawkish death scene which serves as a device to clarify the back-story, this will be one of my books of the year.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.