LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE-I Promise You Can't Put it Down

From the moment you start Taffy Brodesser-Akner's novel, LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE (LIC), you won't put it down until you find out how the Fletcher family members fare with their neuroses and with each other. The patriarch of the family is Carl Fletcher, a wealthy Long Island business owner. The apex of the plot's trajectories unfurl following Carl's kidnapping in 1980 from his driveway that lasted several days. The repercussions of this frightening ordeal that ended with Carl's safe return, left a damaging impact on his entire family.  Though physically unharmed, Carl is now a hollow husk of human being leaving his wife and mother to manage the family and their affairs. Brodesser-Akner gained notoriety with her previous novel, FLEISCHMAN IS IN TROUBLE. While both deal with Jewish neuroses and tropes of Jewish assimilation, LIC is a much darker and troubling novel that resonates closely with Jonathan Franzen's depictions of Jewish family dysfunction. If you're a fan of either skillful author, grab on to your hat and hold on for the rollercoaster ride of affluent, self-destructive individuals inherent in third generation Jewish families. The narration is told mainly through a triptych of characters; the three Fletcher children, Nathan, "Beamer" and Jenny. This stinging parody preys on the adage "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves".  As with the Fletchers, the third generation often finds itself at odds with the initial wealth creation and the values of their ancestry. The family's Rabbi said, "The Fletchers were a great Jewish American family" The author explains this to mean, "They'd survived and proliferated, that they'd come to this country, observed the landscape, and deftly assimilated into it. They did such a good job of this that, ultimately, they disappeared undetected into a completely different diaspora." Nathan, Ben and Jen prove to be the stereotyped squander generation; the downfall of wealthy families. The flagrant ways the three siblings run through their family fortune and steer away from their lineage creates havoc for themselves and their loved ones. They are express train wrecks we can't turn away from. These over indulgent, insufferable people comprise the real Long Island Compromise."That you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born." The concession that the fault lies not in their own capacities but rather it lies in the stars, is as repugnant to swallow as these individuals. For those who like a seething satire and carnage, this is a novel to be consumed ferociously. Some will detest the non-stop calamities. For me, I loved to loathe these vivid characters who never had a chance to be normal. "In order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people."This is absurdist comedy spawned and twisted from reality.