Stuck in this cage of anxieties

Here were the contents of his wandering consciousness: Was this a new bedspread? Was this abstract painting the same in every room of the hotel? How did the artist feel about a great, big deal to mass-produce his ugly painting for the Radisson corporation? Did it make him feel more like an artist or less? If it was in every room here, did it also mean it was in every Radisson? Did they ever clean this room? Had anyone ever died in it? How many other people had fucked amid these pleasant neutrals? How long had he been here already? Was he always here? Did he always exist in this room?

And: Was his career over?

And: Was his wife going to leave him?

And: Why, at forty-two, was he still stuck in this cage of anxieties that he was hoping, by now, would have begun to mellow?

There were too many words forming images in his head. There were too many concerns. My god, how many drugs do you have to take to become the canine part of yourself: wordless, directionless, worry-free — to submit to just feeling, just instinct, just the very moment?

Long-Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is funny. It's also tragic. It's about a kidnapping, but it's not really about the kidnapping. It's about all the money, but it's not really about the money. Reviews tend toward the lacklustre, focusing on the unlikability of the book's characters, their whiny dramas of privilege and entitlement.

Inspired by a real-life kidnapping of a wealthy Long Island businessman, the novel imagines the trauma and fallout experienced by the victim, his mother, his wife, his two young sons, his as-yet unborn daughter, and pretty much everyone in their wake.

"This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don't let it in." 

The novel's current day is a few decades after the kidnapping. The perspective shifts from one child to another: middle child Beamer, failed Hollywood writer on a quest for the ultimate blackout; eldest Nathan, land use lawyer, "drunk on the promise of a life of low-risk, nonconfrontational tedium"; and genius Jenny, who thinks of "wealth as a crippling starting position."

You should know also that it's a Jewish family. Long Island Compromise is very much about inherited trauma, the trauma of the Holocaust and the immigrant experience, and the burden of survivor's guilt. It describes what it is to grow up with money (but like, a lot of money) when your parents grew up without money, and what it is to grow up with a father who's barely there and with a mother who's too much there, and what it is to grow up when the main character of your own life story is somebody else. It's about keeping secrets, keeping tradition, keeping up appearances, keeping your mouth shut.

The compromise, we learn, is what happens when horny teenage Jewish boys seduce willing but "good" Catholic girls: anal sex. When Beamer suggests it as a title for his father's memoir, it's a metaphor for technicalities, how to get away with not playing by the rules (cuz rules, it seems, are for chumps).

I'd been looking forward to this novel with some trepidation, Brodesser-Akner's previous novel having triggered in me some kind of breakdown involving buckets of tears and necessitating talk therapy. I expected wit, insight, feminism, pop culture, and some nasty truths. By that measure, Long Island Compromise read as a serviceable distraction from my recent overwhelm, wherein I have felt tried and tired in a very ordinary way.

He began to see all of time as happening simultaneously, or close to it. He began to see that he could be at work, or at Nathan's baseball fame, but he could also be locked in that basement. He sat at a Passover seder and saw that this thing that had happened to the Jews, their slavery in Egypt, seemed so ancient, but it wasn't. It was like yesterday. All the periods of time you thought were so long ago were so much closer than you thought they were, just a breath away. Moses was parting the Red Sea and Zelig was stowing away on that ship and Ruth was giving birth to Nathan and Carl was being chained to a pipe all at the same exact time. How can you get over anything if it all is just constantly happening?

He remembered Ruth telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder, back when she still thought things could be different. He laughed at that: post-trauma! anyone who named it that didn't really understand it. There is not post. There's only trauma. Over and over. Time moves on, but you stay there forever. No wonder there was no treatment. How do you treat what now called your life?

Review.  
Excerpt.