Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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The Book:
Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Published 2024; 464 breezy pages.
The Elevator Pitch:
Half a lifetime after their father was briefly kidnapped, the three wealthy but not Succession-wealthy failchildren of a Long Island industrialist come face to face with reality when their grandmother dies and their fortunes maybe sort of disappear, but it’s lightly funny.
Previous Experience:
None. This is Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, after Fleishman Is In Trouble (which got turned into a perfectly cromulent Hulu miniseries a couple of years ago.) She’s written a lot of magazine articles and celebrity profiles.
Why I Picked It Up:
Primarily because the cover uses a great font, but also because it got a pretty good review in The New Yorker last July that I read, made a mental note of, and then forgot about almost completely so that when I saw it on the shelf and read the blurb I had to actually consult my reading journal to confirm that I hadn’t already read it and forgotten about it because it sounded so familiar.
How It Went:
Ok, so, first things first, this book is just The Corrections. Like, it surprised me how much this book was just The Corrections. I had this thought over and over again as I was reading it, and then at the very conclusion there’s a passage about the mother of the family that’s just the ending of The Corrections almost note for note. I don’t mean this as a bad thing, I love The Corrections, I just thought it was kind of funny given that when I went to the library on the day I borrowed this, I was looking for a copy of The Corrections.
Setting this aside: loved this. Great fun. Knocked it out in three evenings, and I’d buy it if I saw a copy somewhere. Loved the satire of the one-two punch of twists at the end (I won’t spoil them, but the book begins “Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” and it turns out that that’s pretty accurate.)
A couple of minor objections:
Personally I never want to hear or see the word “trauma” again. Five-year moratorium on talking about trauma, especially “intergenerational trauma.” This is actually going to come up again in a slightly different way in the next book I’m reading.
Who is the narrator of this story? Is there a narrator? Several times the narrator says “We” and occasionally there’s an “I” but who is that person? Is it one of the various friends and neighbors of the main family whose eyes we occasionally see them through? There’s a versio of this that’s a little more like The Virgin Suicides where we know who the Greek chorus is that might be more effective.
Under no circumstances did I want to know quite that much about the eldest son’s sexual kinks, that section is going for something satirical and doesn’t quite get there, it’s just tedious and gross.
Still, a good time between two covers with some interesting ruminations on the Jewish immigrant experience in America. A-.
Next up: The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen