Given the unavoidable success of her debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel ... All those well-timed twists, neat callbacks and tidy scenes are a mitzvah for this satisfying, touching novel. The talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner over here.
Exuberant and absorbing ... Zippy ... Ingeniously plotted, its various storylines building toward several extremely satisfying plot twists—by which I mean the best kind of twists, ones that are earned, that make the reader simultaneously gasp in surprise and want to hit oneself because, in retrospect, they make so much sense that there’s no excuse for not having seen them coming.
Raucous and ravishing ... Suggests that this author’s talents are boundless ... I’m not going to say whether the first line of the book is prophetic, but it almost doesn’t matter. Brodesser-Akner has written a humane, brazen, gorgeous novel whose words dance exuberantly on the page.
Questions of wealth and class, Jewish identity, and family tensions are compellingly set up at the beginning but then fall away, or become muddled, by the end ... The novel becomes less interesting as the narration changes its focus ... Everything has been rehashed ad nauseam ... Stripped of any uncertainty, Long Island Compromise limps to its drawn-out close, but it really could have ended the moment that poor papa Fletcher was kidnapped.
Takes place against a backdrop rich in shrewd, juicy observations of contemporary life ... At times, Long Island Compromise wanders so far afield you suspect that Brodesser-Akner won’t be able to gather up all of its threads, but cinch them in she does, and expertly.
It’s compelling and perfectly imagined ... I don’t think Compromise is as poignant or instantly relatable as Fleishman, which is about the more common occurrence of divorce. But I do think it’s a good reminder that, while money may buy some kind of happiness, it also can put you in precarious situations and paranoid about showing off the real you.
Heavy-handed ... Begins to flag. The humor is more muted, the pace slower ... Unfortunately, these characters are easy to summarize because the novel presents them in the highly schematic framework of a TV sitcom or a Marxist revenge fantasy ... But as always, Brodesser-Akner is a genius with the chaotic flow of embittered family dialogue ... Often entertaining — after all, Brodesser-Akner is one of the most performative writers alive — but why isn’t it better? ... Neat, compromised.
Brodesser-Akner does a fine job playing up these characters’ neuroses and New York Jew eccentricities so we can get the most enjoyment (and more than a few chuckles) out of their misfortune ... But do we care about any of this? Is it really wink-wink funny? Or are we done with giving our hard-earned attention to the missteps of bumbling, navel-gazing elites? As with anything, it all depends on your taste.
The gags come fast and furious, some of them very funny, a lot of them labored ... Even when scenes fall flat, there’s a certain entertainment in witnessing the author’s sweaty effort to sustain the manic pace ... Maybe it’s this ironic awareness of pop-culture formulas that makes the final sections of “Long Island Compromise” so insufferable. Here the mad-capped, if fatiguing, fun is traded for semiserious therapeutic breakthroughs and life lessons.
At times the novel exhausts itself. It can seem a little like a machine that won’t power down even after it has started smoking ... The more time you spend with each character, the more delusional they seem to be, even as a sense of novelistic sympathy wells. Brodesser-Akner’s magpie style, layering a hum of worry with dialogue and voice-mails and scenes from mobile-phone games, has a singsongy appeal, but it can be difficult to sustain such a high-strung voice over nearly 500 pages.
Brodesser-Akner is ridiculously clever, but never overly so and never merely for the sake of showing off her prodigious way with words. A big reason I love her writing — in any medium — is that every sentence serves the whole. Every word is carefully chosen and I trust that the journey she takes us on will end at a destination worth visiting ... This isn't a breezy beach read and, like Fleishman, you want to restart it as soon as you're done, to find what you missed.
There’s a lip-smacking relish to the way Brodesser-Akner delivers devastation on her luckless characters, and the slow, inevitable flow of failure, where the character can only watch but is powerless to stop it ... his is not fiction that is efficient and controlled, containing only what’s necessary. It’s too much at times – do we need a diversion every time a new character appears? – but sometimes too much is just right.
This set up, of course, owes much to the TV drama Succession ... Characters are largely disconnected, their inner development arrested. Beamer starts the novel doing awful things and does them repeatedly. All the people in his life are selfish and spoilt; and anyway, he is so disconnected from them they can’t shed light on his pain. Consequently, his vulnerability, while obvious, doesn’t quite land, emotionally. Nathan, similarly, begins and ends the novel weak and anxious, while Jenny is grim and hard‑nosed throughout. They are, essentially, awful, sad people.
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.
Heartbreaking and hilarious ... This book is a must-read for those who like witty, observational novels, family sagas, and sharp dialogue and characterization.
Brodesser-Akner can spin an excellent yarn with intelligence and wit. She is very much a post-modern writer, using brackets to expound on details in gossipy, amusing asides ... Only slightly let down only by a mawkish death scene which serves as a device to clarify the back-story, this will be one of my books of the year.
