Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: book review
Overview: The Fletchers were doomed from the start. Or, well, not the start, but from the time that Carl Fletcher was kidnapped and his kids ranged from eight-years-old to in utero. He was returned, relatively unharmed, after a heavy ransom was paid, and he stoically returned to his factory—the very place he was held captive. Though the effects of the kidnapping are written all over the family, it's the one thing they'll never talk about. Overall: 3
Characters: 2 I am truly baffled by this book. For one, there are so many characters that are introduced and named so quickly while being given almost no defining characteristics that the novel is extremely hard to follow. On repeat mentions of the plethora of side characters, I would stare into space confused at who this person could possibly be and why they mattered. Though, honestly, I found myself questioning why I was reading about any of these characters. The book is arranged loosely into 5 sections that give perspectives of each of the Fletchers. It starts with Beamer then moves to Nathan then Jenny then the parents, Ruth and Carl. In between, there are interludes by some third-party narrator that speaks directly to the reader. Each time we move perspectives, we also move back in time to childhood and similarly progress through nearly the same beats through each new perspective. Every time it switches, it just feels like a massive info dump with no momentum and really no depth.
First, we meet Beamer whose only personality trait is that he's a sex addict who also has a drug addiction. He also happens to be a deeply untalented screenwriter who got lucky once. There are so many pages devoted to his various encounters with sex workers that amount to just about nothing helpful in developing who he is (I was minorly getting flashbacks to All Fours). He has a shallow LA wife his family doesn't approve of because she's not Jewish, and he represents one flavor of spoiled rich kid.
Then there's Nathan, the oldest, who remembers that most from his father's kidnapping. He absorbed all of his mother's resulting anxiety which has turned him into an obsessive compulsive adult who can barely function.
Finally, Jenny was born shortly after the kidnapping and feels the most removed from the family. She detests their immense amount of wealth and, despite being extremely smart, can't find direction to save her life. Jenny's character was by far the most interesting and compelling, but halfway through her chapter, it felt like she got a personality exorcism and did a total 360 on who she was in a way that left me totally lost. For it being such a long, dense book with so much info dumping, it really felt like there was very little of substance, which is disappointing cause a family epic about the repercussions of a traumatic family event in a very wealthy family could offer a fascinating cast of characters.
Plot: 3 I sort of covered this with the characters, but just to drive home the point, this book labors every plot point to death. Most are gone over repeatedly. There is so much random background. At the start of each chapter before a character takes over, the narrator voice will go on a tangent about the town or the area or some random bit of Fletcher family history. The organization of the book kills the sense of momentum, and it's amazing that a book that opens with a kidnapping can be so frustrating and tedious in its stasis.
The only reason that I gave plot a star over the characters is because the twist about who the kidnapper is happens to be truly great. It's not framed as a mystery. It's framed as a literary novel delving into these characters in the aftermath. It doesn't succeed on that front. But maybe 40 pages from the end of the book when a random final sentence on the page lets slip who the mastermind of the kidnapping was, I was genuinely shocked and impressed at how much sense it made. Of course, since this isn't a mystery, nothing is made of this revelation, and it's simply a piece of telling to the reader, so no characters react to this tide-turning information. If Brodesser-Akner had actually written a mystery, this might've been a much more interesting reading experience.
Writing: 3 I wasn't sure what to expect going into this novel since it took me multiple attempts to actually read Fleishman because I just found it dense. When I did finally read it all, the characters were interesting and multifaceted. The pacing wasn't great, but there was plenty to like about it.
This novel is a free fall from that standard. I read this book much faster from sheer will to have it over, but the development just isn't there. It also felt like the book just completely lacked editorial oversight. The structure was strange and messy; there were so many strange writing devices that were employed that felt almost juvenile or underdeveloped at best, and there was just so much info-dumping without managing to say anything. Whole massive sections could've been totally cut out.
Beyond that, I usually am pretty forgiving of typos. Humans make books and no one is perfect. But I was surprised at the number of copyediting mistakes I found. From a repeated sentence that did not seem at all intentional to a few typos with individual words, the errors just added to the overall hastily thrown together feeling of the book. There was promise here. This book just needed more time to develop. I still can't figure out what Brodesser-Akner was trying to accomplish here. There were many nuanced paths this story could've taken, none of which were realized.
It feels like this book was setting off to be a family epic in the vein of many recent successful books like Wellness by Nathan Hill or The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, but it doesn't quite find that bar.
More on Reading, Writing, and Me:
Comments
Post a Comment