Long Island Compromise

Description

Long Island Compromise
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

ISBN: 9780593133491
Hardcover, new

Brief Description:
An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that
shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and
inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in
Trouble “A big, juicy, wickedly funny social satire . . . probably the
funniest book ever about generational family trauma.”—Oprah Daily “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.