After the kidnapping

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019), which concerned a crumbling marriage, was a bestseller that the author went on to adapt for television. A journalist known for her long-form celebrity profiles, Brodesser-Akner credits her day job with informing her fiction. Profiling people made her realize that the standard film story arc, in which a character is expected to evolve, doesn’t ring true. In life, while perspective might shift, problems tend to remain unresolved. In this sense a novel is better suited to verisimilitude: the characters don’t necessarily have to change much, “but maybe the reader can [go on to] understand them enough to have some empathy for them”, Brodesser-Akner mused in a profile of Jonathan Franzen (New York Times, June 26, 2018).

Her second novel, Long Island Compromise, a family saga with Franzen-esque aspirations, is more ambitious than Fleishman. Carl Fletcher, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is the wealthy owner of a Styrofoam factory. He lives in a “preternaturally safe” neighbourhood in Long Island with his wife, Ruth, who is pregnant with their third child, and their two sons: six-year-old Nathan and four-year-old Bernard (“Beamer”). The family’s suburban security is upended one morning in 1980, when Carl is kidnapped from his driveway. He is held and tortured for a week until Ruth pays the $250,000 ransom. As we learn in an author’s note, the incident – though not the characters – was inspired by the kidnapping in 1974 of a family friend of Brodesser-Akner’s.

While Carl tries to remain stoical on his return home, downplaying the ordeal as an “inconvenience”, he is never the same again. “Post-trauma!” he laughs. “There is no post. There’s only trauma.” While two perpetrators are found and convicted for the kidnapping, most of the marked ransom payment remains unrecovered, a fact that continues to haunt him four decades later, where the story picks up again.

As the family members gather for the funeral of Carl’s mother, all still bear the scars of the incident. Ruth has denied herself happiness to take care of her husband. Nathan is a land-use lawyer enamoured of paperwork and scared of his own shadow. Beamer is a screenwriter struggling to come up with new ideas after a trilogy of action movies that he has co-written with a friend. Instead he passes his time re-enacting his father’s kidnapping “during scheduled drug-fueled orgies with sex workers”. Jenny, who is ashamed of the family wealth, gives away most of her trust fund distributions and organizes unions.

The Fletchers are lurched further into crisis when their fortune evaporates due to a series of unfortunate events. Although written humorously, Long Island Compromise takes on some weighty themes, including ancestral trauma, family secrets, generational wealth and postwar American Jewish identity. Carl, Nathan notes, “was too delicate to ask him about his own day”, but “could absorb an untold amount of Holocaust stories, which is as close to describing the modern Jewish condition as you can get”.

Beamer’s professional insecurities were, the author has said in an interview, based on her own. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) his despicable behaviour, he is the most engaging character. As with Toby Fleishman’s exploits, Brodesser-Akner clearly had fun writing about Beamer’s escapades:

A Mulholland backflip consists of the following: a hit of Ecstasy, followed by a speedball, followed by a handful of Lunesta, followed by a crushed Plexidil – a drug that was only briefly on the market in 2012 and that was designed to treat restless leg syndrome but also accidentally ignited dormant and sometimes nonexistent gambling addictions as a side effect – placed under the tongue. Chase with a Coke Zero.

Sadly, such riffs – in breathless prose that itself sounds infused with amphetamines – are insufficient to carry the reader for 450 pages. The ending – including a mini disquisition from the third-person narrator concerning their feelings about wealth – leaves us with neither the satisfaction of poetic justice nor empathy for the characters. Brodesser-Akner should have taken a page from Franzen, whose fiction improved when he started putting social criticism into essays rather than trying to “Trojan-horse them into his novels’ characters or plot points”, as she put it herself.

And, while we desperately need more comedy in fiction, the humour in Long Island Compromise doesn’t always land. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this novel was written primarily with an eye to television. If so, one understands the temptation to compromise: according to the entertainment news website Deadline (April 18, 2024), Apple acquired the rights to develop a series based on Long Island Compromise “in a competitive situation”, with bids of as much as $1 million upfront.

Mia Levitin is a cultural and literary critic based in London

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post After the kidnapping appeared first on TLS.