Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner review – trials of the wealthy

‘Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” The first line of Long Island Compromise sets the tone: a self-aware narrator commanding our attention. It’s an instant connection, which shouldn’t be a surprise because this is New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose intelligent and supremely engaging debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, was an international hit and became a Disney+ TV series. Second books can be fatal, of course, and clearly Brodesser-Akner has decided to go big with a novel about that curse of contemporary America – serious wealth. Apple TV+ has already bought the rights.

The story kicks off in 1980 with a kidnapping. Super-rich polystyrene foam factory owner Carl Fletcher is swiped from the driveway of his enormous Long Island waterfront home, where his pregnant wife, Ruth, is giving their two sons, Nathan, eight, and “Beamer”, six, bowls of cereal. It is a brilliantly orchestrated opening, 30 pages of calmly narrated shock, chaos and panic – the $250,000 demand, the FBI, the media, the reaction of the wider community, women in avocado- and mustard-coloured kitchens gossiping down phone lines. Pregnant Ruth, sobbing hysterically, ends up dropping the ransom money in an airport bin, accompanied – unfathomably – by little Beamer, the child frozen in terror. Carl is returned battered and traumatised. He’ll never recover. The rest of the novel documents the shattering emotional fallout.

The Fletcher adults try “to make their world normal again”. An old family saying – “there’s a dybbuk in the works” – is often rolled out. It has origins partly in the Jewish ghettoes: a dybbuk, the omniscient narrator tells us, is a miserable soul who can’t get to heaven, so sticks around to cause chaos on earth. Of course, inherited trauma does that too.

Next we’re in present-day Los Angeles with Beamer, now a Hollywood screenwriter in his 40s, married with two children. Carl’s mother, the family matriarch, has died and Ruth, who, since the kidnapping, has devoted herself to protecting her mentally fragile husband, is trying to ring Beamer with the news. Beamer isn’t picking up, though, because he’s high on drugs, naked and hog-tied in a seedy airport hotel with two bored sex workers who are making him lick the carpet. He has a fierce addiction problem. His brief screenwriting career is dead because he writes kidnappings into every storyline; his only real talent is for letting his family down. A series of eye-watering but grimly inevitable events make this abundantly clear.

His siblings are similarly dysfunctional. Nathan, now a lawyer, has crippling anxiety. Married with twin sons who are about to have their barmitzvah, he is neurotic, brittle and easily bullied. Consequently, like Beamer, he makes awful, self-destructive choices and lets everyone down.

Then there is Jenny, born some months after the kidnapping, but equally damaged by it. Jenny, who loathes everyone other than Beamer, has chosen a career in workers’ rights – ironic, given how badly the Fletcher family treats its factory workers – but is no less isolated and miserable for it. Supposedly the least interested in money, when the factory hits a financial crisis, Jenny is the first to notice that the vast monthly trust fund payment hasn’t landed in her account.

We get Ruth’s story, too. She seems potentially sympathetic but turns out to be just as self-indulgent as her children. Her greatest burden is having to watch them “flailing as they aimed to find meaning in a life where they didn’t have to work for anything”.

This set up, of course, owes much to the TV drama Succession (which is consciously referenced in a subplot): adult siblings messed up by their parents’ extraordinary wealth, their inner lives locked on self-destruct, a vacuum where parental love and attention should be. Succession works because even though everyone in it is horrendous, there is tremendous character nuance and development, and so we come, despite ourselves, to care deeply. The sibling relationships, particularly, offer changing, multi-dimensional perspectives which generate pity and  compassion.

This does not happen so readily in Long Island Compromise, where characters are largely disconnected, their inner development arrested. Beamer starts the novel doing awful things and does them repeatedly. All the people in his life are selfish and spoilt; and anyway, he is so disconnected from them they can’t shed light on his pain. Consequently, his  vulnerability, while obvious, doesn’t quite land, emotionally. Nathan, similarly, begins and ends the novel weak and anxious, while Jenny is grim and hard‑nosed throughout. They are, essentially, awful, sad people.

This, of course, is the “terrible ending” we’ve been promised. The omniscient narrator pops up in the final pages to remind us of the deal we struck at the start: “No growth, no revelation. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.”

It’s a solid idea: supremely rich Americans are ghastly and will never change. But despite the engaging style, the brilliant eye for detail, the wit and scope, it is quite hard to be with these people for more than 400 pages – though for some readers, the dark humour will offset their unpleasantness. The book is about much more than its individuals, of course. It is about a changing Long Island Jewish-American community, and the wider historical context of Jewish-American immigrants.

One of the more interesting subplots traces the story the grandfather told of how he managed to escape from Poland to America. Slowly, it emerges the story is based on a lie, a terrible act which somehow defines them all. As an evisceration of extreme wealth, this novel makes a bold and relevant point, and yet, without redemptive qualities – softness, hope, empathy – it can feel relentless. It is fun to condemn, but hard to care.

• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is published by Wildfire (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.