Long Island Compromise

Long Island Compromise, published in 2024, is a family saga and the second novel by American author Taffy Brodesser-Akner. In an essay for The New York Times Magazine, Brodesser-Akner explains that the novel was loosely inspired by the 1974 kidnapping of a family friend, Jack Teich (Brodesser-Akner, Taffy. “The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape.” The New York Times Magazine, 7 July 2024). Though the central family of her novel is not meant to resemble the Teich family, Brodesser-Akner was interested in seeing how wealth affects familial experiences of trauma. At the time of writing, the novel is being developed for adaptation as a limited series on Apple TV.

The novel begins when Carl Fletcher, a Jewish American polystyrene manufacturer, is kidnapped outside his Long Island home. After a grueling attempt to rescue him with ransom money, Carl is returned to his family with new emotional scars. Over the next four decades, those scars continue to impact Carl’s wife, Ruth, and his children, Nathan, Bernard “Beamer,” and Jenny, in various ways. Brodesser-Akner uses this story to explore Wealth as a Barrier to Personal Development, Trauma and Familial Repression, and The Illusory Promise of Certainty.

This guide refers to the first edition of the novel, published by Random House in 2024.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss addiction and mental illness (and the social stigma surrounding these topics), death, and death by suicide.

Plot Summary

In 1980, Carl Fletcher, the Jewish American owner of a polystyrene factory in Long Island, is kidnapped one morning from the driveway of his home. Once Carl’s pregnant wife, Ruth, discovers that he is missing, she calls the police to help locate him. Five days later, the kidnappers call to demand a ransom. Ruth is forced to take her younger son, Bernard, with her as she picks up the ransom money and delivers it to John F. Kennedy International Airport. After Carl is released, Ruth and Carl’s mother, Phyllis, agree never to openly discuss the kidnapping in front of the children. Phyllis urges Carl to forget the experience, telling him that the kidnapping happened to his body but not to him. The Fletchers move into a house on Phyllis’s estate. Several months later, Ruth gives birth to a daughter, Jenny.

Decades later, Phyllis dies. Ruth attempts to share the news with Bernard, who now goes by “Beamer” and works as an action film screenwriter in Los Angeles. Beamer is preoccupied, however, by his engagements with sex workers and his attempts to sell a new screenplay based on The Santiago Trilogy, the breakout films he had written with his best friend, Charlie Messinger. Beamer learns the news and travels to Long Island with his family. During this time, he attempts to escape his addictions and start fresh for the sake of his family. He returns to Los Angeles and shares his screenplay with Charlie, who challenges him to write a story that might be more personally meaningful to him than yet another installment in the Santiago saga. This criticism provokes a resurgence of Beamer’s drug addiction, which sends him on a manic quest to recruit actor Mandy Patinkin for his newest project. Beamer collapses outside Patinkin’s house and is committed to a rehabilitation facility.

Jenny, Ruth, and Ruth’s eldest son, Nathan, discover that Carl’s factory has become a liability, which threatens the Fletcher family fortune. Nathan is especially anxious about this development because his personal finances put him at risk of bankruptcy. Nathan has been suspended from working at his uncle Arthur Lindenblatt’s law firm after attempting to bribe a town councilman to secure a legal certificate. He has also sunk most of his savings into a risky investment fund managed by his childhood friend and bully, Mickey Mayer. Nathan later learns that Mickey has misrepresented the success of his fund, leaving Nathan unable to recover his investment. Nathan is unsure when to tell his wife, Alyssa, the truth about their finances, given that Alyssa is deeply committed to renovating their house in time for their sons’ shared bar mitzvah.

Jenny, on the other hand, considers the family’s misfortunes a blessing in disguise, as she has spent most of her adult life trying to carve an identity for herself outside of wealth. After several listless years in college and graduate school, Jenny now works for the graduate student union at Yale. She remains torn between the identity her work creates for her and the identity she feels nostalgic for whenever she returns home to Middle Rock. Shortly before Phyllis’s death, Beamer challenges Jenny to make peace with her wealthy background and live what he considers a “real” life outside of academia. During Phyllis’s shiva, Ruth insinuates that Jenny’s bohemian values insulate her from caring about developments in the Middle Rock community. Jenny becomes despondent and hides out in her family’s Greenwich Village brownstone, where she stays for several months, leading to the loss of her job.

Ruth discovers Jenny in the brownstone, which she is considering selling to save the family. Ruth resents Jenny’s distaste for their wealth and realizes that her children don’t know how to survive in the world without it. She wonders if she has cursed herself and her children by marrying Carl for his wealth. Ruth later instructs Carl’s sister, Marjorie, to demand her share of the family estate so that she can trigger a sale of the Middle Rock property. Under the influence of drugs, Marjorie believes that Ruth has been possessed by the spirit of Phyllis. She misinterprets Ruth’s instructions and burns down the factory to save the family from its liability.

Nathan reveals the truth about his financial situation to Alyssa. They push forward with their sons’ bar mitzvah, and Nathan becomes emotional remembering that his parents missed his own bar mitzvah. Jenny picks Beamer up from his rehabilitation facility and helps him complete his treatment. They attend the bar mitzvah and simultaneously realize that they have been doomed from the start by their wealth. During the party, Carl follows a vision of his mother outside the tent and is invited by the spirit of his father to experience judgment for his behavior in the years following his kidnapping. Carl soon dies in the arms of Ike Besser, his loyal foreman and, unbeknownst to everyone, Carl’s kidnapper.

Returning from sabbatical, Arthur reveals to Ruth that Carl’s parents had stashed diamonds and Israel bonds away in case of an emergency. This restores their wealth, allowing Ruth to sell the Middle Rock estate and move to Greenwich Village. Each of her sons reconciles with their respective wives. Jenny gets back together with her high school sweetheart and moves with him to Cincinnati. The narrator, speaking in the collective voice of the Middle Rock community, predicts that none of the Fletcher children will ever grow into emotionally stable, independent people.