Book review of “Long Island Compromise” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

But anyone who has a great debut has had dubious experiences with inheriting wealth, and that is precisely the difficult subject of “Long Island Compromise.” It is the story of the children of a wealthy family who struggle to live up to the expectations of their extremely successful parents.

The Fletchers of Middle Rock, Long Island, are the embodiment of the Jewish-American dream. With all the wounded envy that Brodesser-Akner can channel so hilariously, the garrulous narrator tells us, “They were the pinnacle.” They are fiercely defending their heritage while simultaneously determined to embrace all the trappings (and plastic surgery) of assimilation. You can’t mind that, Jay Gatsby: The Fletchers live in the largest house “on a block of extremely burglar-prone houses,” with a deck that stretches out over Long Island Sound as if it were “their own swimming pool.”

Their origin story has been retold and revamped like a book of the Torah: Grandfather Zelig escaped the Nazis and made it to the United States with nothing but the clothes on his back and the formula for a revolutionary packaging material called Styrofoam. A few decades later, the family factory produces enough polystyrene to protect the Fletchers from all the shocks and convulsions of the world – or so it seems.

The novel begins in 1980 with a thrilling prologue: 33-year-old Carl Fletcher, son of the late Zelig, is kidnapped by two anti-Semitic thugs who beat and threaten him for five days. When he is finally ransomed and released from this ordeal, he spends a month in the hospital and then goes back to work at the factory, “where no one mentioned he was gone.” Grandma Phyllis makes it clear: “Listen to me, boy. This happened to your body. This didn’t happen to you.”

It’s hard to imagine more devastating psychological advice, and when the novel picks up some four decades later, we see the consequences of adhering to Grandmother Phyllis’s insanely repressive diagnosis. No one ever spoke of Carl’s kidnapping, and the lingering terror has seeped into the family’s water table, poisoning his three grown children. Despite their weakened constitutions, they might have been able to get by like this forever. After all, those quarterly $500,000 dividend checks are wonderfully edifying!

But then Brodesser-Akner burns through the family fortune like a cruel child using a magnifying glass in the sun, and we see the young Fletchers scurrying about in panic. It’s an ideal disaster to judge the fortitude of these spoiled beneficiaries of a company they did nothing to build and don’t deserve.

Beamer, the middle child, is a Hollywood screenwriter who has spent his career recycling increasingly watered-down tales of kidnapping. The best part of the novel is a dizzying dive through Beamer’s drug-addled life, peppered with humiliating treatment he receives from a dominatrix while he tries to write yet another kidnapping film that will give him the fame and notoriety he feels he deserves. Yes, Brodesser-Akner may be wearing an old pair of Jonathan Franzen sneakers, but, my God, she can run like the wind.

From here on, however, “Long Island Compromise” begins to falter. The humor is more subdued, the pace slower.

Nathan, the eldest child, has responded to his father’s kidnapping by insuring every inch of his life with insurance policies designed to protect him against fire, flood, collision, bedbugs, earthquakes, shipwreck, medical malpractice, and, of course, kidnapping. The narrator notes that Nathan is “not so much a whole person as a collection of tics: a compound panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the dreadful future.”

Finally, Jenny, who was not even born when her father was kidnapped, has devoted her life to self-righteous rejection of her family, a pursuit that has left her friendless and joyless.

Unfortunately, these characters are easy to summarize, as the novel presents them within the highly schematic framework of a TV sitcom or a Marxist revenge fantasy. (Also, note to novelists: if one of your main characters is a “collection of tics” and your name isn’t Charles Dickens, revise it.) With the Fletchers’ financial ruin established early on, we are left to weave through their bankruptcies like passengers meandering through the zigzagging airport security line to an X-ray that won’t tell us anything we don’t already know.

But as always, Brodesser-Akner is a genius with the chaotic flow of bitter family dialogue. In her novels, conversations shoot and turn with the outrageous unpredictability of a flock of frightened birds. And of course, “Long Island Compromise” is often entertaining—Brodesser-Akner is, after all, one of the most performative writers alive—but why isn’t it better?

The answer, I suspect, is that the novel was long in the making as a kind of psychological resolution. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Brodesser-Akner confessed that she had been thinking about the actual 1974 kidnapping of a family friend named Jack Teich for decades. How, she asks, could Teich and his wife and children ever recover from that ordeal? But they did. “The Teiches marched in lockstep toward a bright future that was and is the Jewish dream of America,” she writes. “Can you imagine that you could go through that and come out OK?”

Her interest in the Teiches’ resilience is not just theoretical. As she explains, she had a horrific birth of her first child 16 years ago under the care of a cruel and possibly abusive obstetrician. Why, she wonders, was she unable to recover from that trauma as well as Jack Teich and his family?

Her essay’s deeply personal answer to that question is both a punch to the gut and a tender embrace. Rather than retreating into the superficiality that “Long Island Compromise” resolves, she confronts candidly the sweaty details of Teich’s kidnapping, her own emergency C-section, and the psychic scars of both. And so the essay is compelling in a way that this clean, uncompromising novel ultimately is not.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club Newsletter for the Washington Post. He is a book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Random House. 444 pages. $30.