Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2024) Long Island Compromise.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel Fleishman is in Trouble was an international bestseller. Long Island Compromise is her second novel. Awards and television series inevitably to follow.

Grab your reader with the first line. It’s the kind of cliché right up there with the known knowns and the unknown knowns. Akner knows her readers will want something smart, bookish and literary, perhaps left-leaning. Aware of the paradox of what you’d to survive is not the same as what you’d do to prosper. To live a life. And asks, what kind of life?

‘Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?’

‘On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, Carl Fletcher, one of the richest men in Long Island where we grew up, was kidnapped on his driveway on the way to work.’

The ending is indeed terrible. Terrible in the way that if you hear the word, Tory, you can’t help adding the word, SCUM to it and meaning it at a visceral level. To know that the American dream died well before the moron’s moron, Trump, repackaged and sold KKK mantras, while waving the stars and stripes. The idea of getting rid of the blacks and coloured as a way of making America great again. To understand that the idea of meritocracy is an arcane piece of propaganda. Pap fed to the poor that makes rich folk feel better about themselves.

Taffy Brodesser-Akney understands this. Loathing and shame are part of her character mix. Being Jewish is incidental to writing what she knows. Long Island Compromise was published in 2024, after the cultural genocide of Palestinians became actual genocide (although it’s always hardly been hidden and happened long before now).  

The first question I asked myself was Long Island Compromise, just Fleishman is in Trouble, repackaged and resold? Different characters with different haircuts, but the same old shit, marketed as a neo-Dickensian blockbuster stretching to 444 pages?

Fleishman, for example, had a house on Long Island. Rather, it was his wife’s house, or ex-wife’s house. They weren’t really rich enough to have a house on Long Island. But they were part of that Jewish group that met and helped live each other’s lives.

Carl Fletcher is in a money league about the Fleishmans. Other Jewish families circle around their inherited wealth and grandeur. They are the kings and queens of Long Island.

Their heritage is common labour. Zelig, Carl’s father, came from Poland. Fleeing the Holocaust, he arrived in Staten Island in 1942, with nothing but a formula for this marvellous material called Styrofoam. He and his family prospered.

Of course, history tells us that during The Great Depression until the end of the Second World War, very few Jews made it into America. Those that did so came indirectly through places like Canada. Protectionism, hatred and suspicion of Jews were mainstream ideas that had taken hold of the State Department. US agencies, aware of the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe and Germany, still excluded most poor immigrants, but Jews in particular.

Akner’s characters play this out. A nod toward the first set of immigrants, (Zelig) building a house, with high walls. Their assimilated family living in the house, (Carl). And the third-generation Americans, traumatised by their wealth, burning the house down (Nathan, Beamer and Jenny).

That’s too simplistic for a top-class writer as Akner to play with. The idea that wealth corrupts. Look at the Sackler family, the Murdoch’s or the moron’s moron as a good example of this. Beamer’s screenwriter buddy, Charlie, for example, is writing a highly successful drama called ‘Family Business’, which pays for his ticket to success and wealth by merit and not inherited wealth.

Robert Caro, in his award-winning series of biographies of Lyndon Johnson, suggests a different metric. Wealth and power do corrupt, but they also reveal. Trump the narcissistic, rapist, psychopath, is hardly a revelation. Akner gives her characters more breathing room. Makes them more human. Like us and not them. Real people. That’s her impressive ability. To open doors that have been shut to us poor, barely literate, schmucks. Read on.  

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