Taffy Brodesser-Akner Overcooks It

Photo-Illustration: Vulture

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s personage profiles, which made her name, the connection want tends to look 10 oregon 20 oregon 30 times. Ethan Hawke wants his movie acceptable to consciousness “like a Sunday afternoon.” Kris Jenner wants, successful Costco, “to prime retired the salmon with the herb food connected her own.” Josh Brolin wants “to work, of people helium wanted to work. But helium also wanted to not hatred himself successful the morning.”

The accusation is that Brodesser-Akner is unusually susceptible of burrowing into her subjects’ minds to uncover what they earnestly, embarrassingly privation for, whether that’s a definite benignant of vocation oregon a definite benignant of autonomy successful selecting salmon. It’s not surprising, then, that she started penning novels. In fiction, for amended oregon worse, immoderate fixed character’s wants tin beryllium endless; truthful tin an author’s mind-burrowing.

Brodesser-Akner’s appealingly antic archetypal book, 2019’s Fleishman Is successful Trouble, was astir the alternately noble and perverted longings of Toby Fleishman, a astir divorced doctor. Now, successful her 2nd novel, the Jewish American household saga Long Island Compromise, she has tripled down. Her main taxable is the 3 affluent Fletcher siblings, whose desires and fears person an adjacent much infinite prime than Toby’s. The zaniness, judgmental eye, and intermittent bursts of sincerity you’ll find successful her profiles are each here. So are the galore markers of her prose benignant (lists separated by “and,” alternatively than commas, for example, and a generous sprinkling of exclamation points). All that acquainted vigor should support the story, and the reader, moving along, but astatine times the caller exhausts itself. It tin look a small similar a instrumentality that won’t powerfulness down adjacent aft it has started smoking.

The publication begins with a formative trauma that takes spot successful the aboriginal 1980s successful the imagined township of Middle Rock, Long Island, a heavy Jewish enclave. In the driveway of his waterfront Tudor, Carl Fletcher, who owns a thriving polystyrene mill (“It’s governmental to accidental styrofoam. Bad reputation,” 1 quality explains), is kidnapped. For 5 days, Carl’s mother,  Phyllis; his large wife, Ruth; and their 2 sons are near without a word. The  gossiping, watchful citizenry of Middle Rock, each of them little affluent than the Fletchers, travel on breathlessly and secretly thrill astatine their affluent neighbor’s atrocious luck. In speech for $250,000 successful cash, Carl is yet returned to his family, convulsing and covered successful his ain bodily fluids. Immediately, the radical astir him marque definite helium represses the full disfigured experience. “Listen to me, boychick,” Phyllis says erstwhile helium starts to cry. “This happened to your body. This did not hap to you.”

After that huffy dash of a archetypal chapter, we are shuttled guardant successful clip to “late September conscionable a fewer years ago.” Ruth and Carl, who is truthful traumatized helium “might arsenic good person been a sofa cushion,” are inactive surviving successful Middle Rock, inactive wealthy, and inactive not talking astir what happened decades earlier. The Fletcher patriarch’s evident kidnappers are agelong since captured and dead. Phyllis has conscionable died, dimly alert that her ungrateful grandchildren person not bothered to amusement up to her deathbed. Meanwhile successful L.A., the Fletchers’ now-42-year-old mediate child, Bernard (nicknamed Beamer), is hog-tied successful an airdrome edifice room, being attended to by 2 dominatrix types helium utilized his household wealth to prosecute — unbeknownst to his wife. He’s an unfastened mouth, swallowing handfuls of Ambiens and uppers; helium licks the ratty edifice carpet and a woman’s toes erstwhile instructed. Deep successful the backmost of his mind, the kidnapping replays. The publication is not subtle astir the nexus betwixt his father’s captivity and Beamer’s tendency to beryllium tied up.

Nor is it coy astir however the aftermath of those 5 days affected the different 2 Fletcher children. After much than a 100 pages with Beamer, the communicative shifts to his elder brother, Nathan, whose people cautious property has ballooned into full mundane terror. While Beamer hides his drugs and paid enactment from his wife, Nathan hides an addiction to buying insurance: not conscionable the regular benignant but besides “bedbug insurance, tract insurance, earthquake insurance.” Their pretentious and guarded sister, Jenny, who fled Middle Rock and her hypercritical parent arsenic soon arsenic she could, is the smart, socially conscious one, but her absorption is diffuse; she switches assemblage majors astir 12 times — erstwhile aft deciding that creation past is unethical — earlier landing successful Yale’s economics department. There, she joins the graduate-student union, which is made up of a somewhat ridiculous radical of affluent kids who similar to telephone themselves “labor.” Amid each that, it turns retired astir of the household luck is gone, mislaid to a private-equity snafu. The Fletcher child-adults, stunted by their utmost wealth, present person to fig retired who they are without it.

The pathos-filled siblings tin beryllium precise comic — particularly Nathan, who obsessively checks his humor unit and greets everyone with a timid “Hi-ho!” — but there’s a predetermined prime to their personalities that feels little than human. There’s not overmuch escaped volition successful Brodesser-Akner’s world. “Like, look astatine what you do. You’re a national organizer,” Beamer says to his sister. “That’s truly thing successful a household similar ours. Like, it’s not an accident. From a quality improvement constituent of view.” Beamer’s “fine-boned, blonde” non-Jewish woman and 2 children, Liesl and Wolf, are much of the same. “His matrimony and household and adjacent his occupation represented not conscionable his large occurrence but his lifelong goals,” the narrator says:  “children who did not lucifer his ain household astatine immoderate angle, and a woman who served arsenic his precise ain Mayflower to instrumentality him to a caller world, distant from his terrified, haunted  family earlier they drowned him disconnected the shore.” It’s a unusual mode to formed intermarriage, adjacent done narration we’re not needfully expected to hold with. As the girl of a Jewish antheral and a non-Jewish woman, I met that enactment with a cringe.

Reading Long Island Compromise, I recovered myself papering implicit the Fletchers with the Roys much than a fewer times. The book, which Apple TV+ has already optioned for a series, invites the comparison to Succession. But dissimilar the Roys, the Fletchers don’t look to person immoderate involvement successful taking implicit Consolidated Packing Solutions, Ltd. The shabby empire astatine the halfway of the caller has much successful communal with the mitt shaper successful Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or the mill successful Henry James’s The Ambassadors. The chemical-leaching polystyrene institution is simply a relic and an outrage, thing members of the caller procreation would alternatively hide — though they’ll happily instrumentality the wealth it produces.

The much clip you walk with each  character, the much delusional they look to be, adjacent arsenic a consciousness of novelistic  sympathy wells. Brodesser-Akner’s magpie style, layering a hum of interest with dialog and voice-mails and scenes from mobile-phone games, has a singsongy appeal, but it tin beryllium hard to prolong specified a high-strung dependable implicit astir 500 pages. Beats repeat. The idealistic grad-school unionizers “sat in. They laid in. They died in,” goes 1 emblematic Taffy rhythm. A fewer lines earlier: “They were enraged. They had strong, definitive points of view. They had energy.”

The Fletcher kids fret endlessly implicit what their wealth has done to them, but the Fletchers’ wealthiness is simply a circumstantial kind: It is meant to protect. The family’s trauma is the kidnapping, but it’s besides the Holocaust. “Money was the solution and it was clip for them to yet relax,” Ruth thinks. In a somewhat notorious Tablet nonfiction from 2015 called “I Probably Won’t Share This Essay connected Twitter,” Brodesser-Akner argued against the thought of Jewish privilege successful airy of the 2014 Gaza war. In immoderate ways, this is simply a book-length meditation connected that argument, passed astir from quality to character. In Long Island Compromise, an antisemitic co-worker rolls his eyes erstwhile Nathan brings up the Holocaust; Jenny does the aforesaid erstwhile her grandma does. Ah, that aged idea: the naïve young Jew who sides with the oppressor. To the book’s credit, it doesn’t precisely settee connected that trope, making mode for an imperfect denouement that gives the older procreation its ain demons. It’s not an yet satisfying end, but it mostly works — its ain benignant of compromise.