Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Long Island Compromise

The author discusses her exhilarating novel, about a moment that shatters a family’s suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance.

In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalised, held for ransom and then returned to his family.

Carl, his wife and three kids begin the hard work of moving on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream.

But nearly forty years later, when Carl’s mother dies, it becomes 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 are a mess: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything – substance, foodstuff, women – to numb his own perpetual terror; and Abigail 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.

Long Island Compromise spans generations of one family’s story, winding through decades of history all the way through to the wild present, dealing along the way with all the mainstays of American Jewish life.

And through it all, it addresses timeless questions about wealth, trauma, the American soul, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.