Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Editorial Assistant Book Club: September 2024

Long Island Compromise

Ron Charles of the Washington Post already beat me to the punch on how I was going to open this exploration of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s latest book Long Island Compromise. It’s not rocket science—the reviewer started by noting the title is a sex reference. Charles took this as a sign of the author’s lack of subtlety, but I believe it portends different things about the novel, a 400-page family epic about three kids in a Jewish Long Island family who inherit a fabulous amount of wealth and the fallout when they lose it all. The title is a bold and telling choice. One that says, foremost, that the author is not making any decisions in service of the reader, but only in service of what she wants to say.

Flashback - Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019)

Before diving into her career as a novelist it’s important to note that Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Taffy, hereafter) was and still is (although not full time now) one of the best celebrity profilers working today. She turned what is a familiar formula of meet celebrity, backfill celebrity bio, sprinkle in a few quotes and touch on current project that is the reason for the profile, into genuine high art. In her profiles, she built layered narratives that seemed to get at the characters and the human behind the persona. A thing that a profile should probably always strive to do but that has become increasingly difficult with the level of awareness and control that famous people now have about what is said and written about them and how far it is allowed to travel. Her profiles of Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke from six years ago remain riveting and worthwhile reads, even as the news cycle has moved far past them— that’s not an easy quality to achieve in journalism and with the consistency as Taffy has. Taffy’s profiles became something to seek out, even if you didn’t care about subject.

So it was not a big surprise that Taffy’s writing — so creative, considered, and observational of human nature — translated to fiction. Her first novel Fleishman is in Trouble, published in the summer of 2019, was one of the great conversation starters in publishing at the time. A book that everyone read and also had opinions about. What had people abuzz was both the conceit of the novel, which is, essentially: what if the dad got stuck with taking care of the kids after a separation and the “big narrative twist” that occurs 3/4^ths into the novel.  What made the novel “work” was its contemporary commentary on marriage and gender roles, and Taffy’s ability to relentlessly excavate it— it ignited conversation. Reviewers described it at the time as “the Tinder-age Portnoy’s Complaint”, “a sharp critique of the lie fueling modern feminism”, and “fresh and modern with a satirical edge”.

What was surprising about Fleishman is in Trouble was that for a novel that gained attention for its zeitgeisty themes, it was more like a Philip Roth novel than just the obvious echoes of Roth’s bawdiness, erudition, and Jewishness. Fleishman was also written with an uncommon 20^th century style of novelists like Updike, Roth, and Cheever. Taffy’s issues, settings, and characters may have been modern but her style favored the kind of extended digression and descriptions that have largely fallen out of favor, even in popular literary fiction. Taffy bucks the general style of the day, which is to use short, direct sentences as the building blocks of a novel, and to consciously move the action or at least the information being gained by the reader forward with every sentence. Whereas most modern writers are trying to dig a trench from one end of a field to the other, Taffy, like many literary writers of the previous generation, is finding a spot and digging straight down. Here is a typical paragraph from Fleishman that showcases how Taffy prefers old-school layers of interiority, going deeper and deeper, rather than the new-school of showing, showing, showing:

But now there was no one to be faithful to. Rachel wasn’t there. She was not in his bed. She was not in the bathroom, applying liquid eyeliner to the area where her eyelid met her eyelashes with the precision of an arthroscopy robot. She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black mood than usual, not by much but a little. She was not up in the middle of the night, complaining about the infinite abyss of her endless insomnia. She was not at Curriculum Night at the kids' extremely private and yet somehow progressive school on the West Side, sitting in a small chair and listening to the new and greater demands that were being placed on their poor children compared to the prior year. (Though, then again she rarely was. Those nights, like the other nights, she was at work, or at dinner with a client, what she called “pulling her weight” when she was being kind, and what she called “being your cash cow” when she wasn't.) So no, she was not there. She was in a completely other home, the one that used to be his, too. Every single morning this thought overwhelmed him momentarily; it panicked him, so that the first thing he thought when he awoke was this: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. It had been he who asked for the divorce, and still: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. Each morning, he shook this off. He reminded himself that this was what was healthy and appropriate and the natural order. She wasn't supposed to be next to him anymore. She was supposed to be in a separate, nicer home.

Only very good writers can get away with this old-school style, which is perhaps why it fell out of fashion so quickly. Sticking in one place in time — i.e. examining one moment with a character until it’s utterly exhausted — as a novelist has a distinct disadvantage of it becoming very clear, very quickly when the writer has nothing else interesting to say. Most editors and maybe many readers have read some boring version of a scene where a character wakes up in the morning, eats breakfast and takes a shower. With 20^th century style this scene is all the more excruciating to read because we have to hear every inane thought between getting out of bed and brewing coffee. Luckily Taffy has many interesting things to say and, ironically, has become incredibly unique among writers for working in this more outdated style. With 20/20 hindsight, it is not surprising novel that Taffy wrote was Fleishman. She is a profiler, and Fleishman is a hyper-focused character study, one that takes little material (see: how much celebrities are willing to open up in 21^st century interviews) and stretches it across many, many pages. Taffy is expertly trained into taking scraps and building them into something witty, insightful, and with depths you could have never expected.

What Fleishman ultimately comes down to is a plot that depends upon a gender swap. Toby Fleishman’s wife, the breadwinner of the family, abandons him. A set of circumstances that was not too uncommon in every other previous century, but with the husband making the money and doing the runner. Toby then has to navigate what it’s like to be solely responsible as a parent and provider while finding himself in middle age, sexually and otherwise. Flip his gender in the previous sentence and there already exists a wealth of great literature about woman facing this exact circumstance. But flip the gender of this familiar middle-aged-mother-finding-herself template and you have two extremely different reactions as a reader to similar circumstances (disdain versus sympathy). My issues with the novel ultimately was how Taffy executed this gender-swap premise (the twist!) and perhaps betrayed the whole exercise by tipping the scales with her coda. But, as I’ve said previously in this newsletter and in this series, if you are contending with a novel’s ideas rather than its construction, then you are dealing with a very good novelist indeed. Taffy more than convinced me that she had the power to make readers think, that an old style could still be relevant, and that it would be worth following whatever she decided to do next.

Back to the Compromise

In Long Island Compromise Taffy continues to adhere to the old-school style, that boring down on a point rather than drilling outward. And she does this primarily with her choices around time. The scope of Long Island Compromise is ostensibly wider than that of her last novel, with an entire family (the Fletchers) with multiple generations as its subject.  Along with a plot driver— again ostensibly — that should give Taffy much more space to work with:  an entire family losing its fortune verses one man losing his wife. Only (mild spoiler) the novel never really moves to the consequences of three wealthy kids losing their wealth. It’s not a book about how a younger generation runs out of money and does bad things, but more so a snapshot of each kid, freeze-framed in the immediate aftermath of learning they have lost their trust fund payments. If your expectation is that losing their money will be the start of the plot, then be forewarned it is also the end of the plot.

Long Island Compromise is a three-part character study of the Fletcher children with a foreword and afterword. The first kid to appear is Beamer, a C-list screenwriter who is up to his ears in drugs and sex addiction, balancing his family life as his second life runs out of control. The second is Nathan, a lawyer up to his ears in neurosis, balancing his family life as his incompetence and fear of the world run out of control. The third kid is Jenny, the most together of the three, dealing with the consequences of their extreme inheritance in a more existential and less destructive manner. Each part is essentially a little bit of the present-day action with the kids learning that the well has run dry, alongside an extended backstory of how exactly they ended up who they are at the moment of crisis.

It is hard to avoid the Succession shaped cloud hanging over Long Island Compromise. It is, after all, three siblings inheriting a big legacy and not exactly knowing what do with it. Further, the three main characters fit neatly into the archetypes mined in that show. Beamer is the wily, addicted brother who is clever but ultimately a fuck-up with childhood trauma that has never healed. Nathan is a professional that only has his job because of family connections, who overestimates his competence, and is prone to delusions of grandeur and getting taking advantage of. And finally, Jenny, the only girl, is clearly the smartest and most aware of all the siblings. Jenny pursues seemingly progressive politics to counteract her family’s legacy without ever actually abandoning the trappings of wealth altogether or being quite capable enough to hack it on her own.

Taffy is having her most fun in the Beamer (Roman) chapters with some truly outrageous, over-the-top sex, drug, and manic creative energy. Beamer is an unlikable, likable character that we enjoy watching unravel, much like that of Toby Fleishman in Taffy’s first novel. Only where the 20^th century style served Taffy in her first novel, plumbing the depths of gender roles in marriage, it begins to peter out when the subject is the useless kids of extremely wealthy people. If Succession is one (albeit incomplete) comparison to Long Island Compromise, then there are surely a dozen others from recent literature and popular culture. Long Island Compromises shows exactly why 20^th century style is such a risky gambit. At the highest possible level Taffy may have picked the literary equivalent of waking up, taking a shower, and having breakfast by examining — so acutely—the disastrous lives and personalities of second-generation rich kids.

Similarly to Fleishman, Long Island Compromise reaches a coda late in the novel (without a true twist this time) that tells you exactly what it intends to say about its subject. The coda (the mildest of spoilers) says that children born into obscene amounts of money find themselves as lotus-eaters, overindulging in everything that makes life easy but never learning how to exist in the practical world. An overabundance of what should make them happy turns them unable to feel. It's a hard point to argue with, one well made, but it’s not much worth talking about either.