‘Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” The first line of Long Island Compromise sets the tone: a self-aware narrator commanding our attention. It’s an instant connection, which shouldn’t be a surprise because this is New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose intelligent and supremely engaging debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, was an international hit and became a Disney+ TV series. Second books can be fatal, of course, and clearly Brodesser-Akner has decided to go big with a novel about that curse of contemporary America – serious wealth. Apple TV+ has already bought the rights.
The story kicks off in 1980 with a kidnapping. Super-rich polystyrene foam factory owner Carl Fletcher is swiped from the driveway of his enormous Long Island waterfront home, where his pregnant wife, Ruth, is giving their two sons, Nathan, eight, and “Beamer”, six, bowls of cereal. It is a brilliantly orchestrated opening, 30 pages of calmly narrated shock, chaos and panic – the $250,000 demand, the FBI, the media, the reaction of the wider community, women in avocado- and mustard-coloured kitchens gossiping down phone lines. Pregnant Ruth, sobbing hysterically, ends up dropping the ransom money in an airport bin, accompanied – unfathomably – by little Beamer, the child frozen in terror. Carl is returned battered and traumatised. He’ll never recover. The rest of the novel documents the shattering emotional fallout.
