Long Island Compromise
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Random House, 2024. 444 Pages. Fiction.
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end. But forty years later, when Carl's mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that nobody ever really got over anything. Carl's wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. Their three grown children are each a mess: Nathan cannot seem to advance at his law firm and may have made a terrible investment with his trust fund; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything--substance, foodstuff, women--in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she is not a product of the family's pathology that she comes to define it. Then there's Carl himself, the prickly, still-terrified father, who has been secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping for years, and the unthinkable act he commits that will alter the family's path forever.
This book was like watching a train wreck and I loved it. Every character is a hot mess! This is a great work of relationship fiction and has a very cinematic feel. It is already being adapted into a streaming series. Every family has dysfunction but its more fun to read about other family's fictional, over the top problems. It is irreverent but describes the family’s friction and faults in a witty, heartbreaking way. I listened to the audiobook and found the reader delightful.
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Darley, the eldest daughter in the Stockton family, has never worried about money. The product of generational wealth and capitalist success, Darley renounced her inheritance when she married Malcolm, a first generation Korean American with a lucrative job in banking. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. Georgiana, newly graduated from Brown and proud to think of herself as a "do-gooder," has enough money from her trust that she's able to work for a pittance at a not-for-profit, where she has started a secret love affair with a senior colleague. But when a scandal derails Malcolm's career, leaving Darley financially in the lurch, when Sasha glimpses the less-than-attractive attributes beneath the Stockton brood's carefully-guarded fȧade, and when Georgiana discovers her boyfriend is married and still in love with his wife, they must all come to terms with what money can't buy--the bonds of love that can make and unmake a family. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of affluent WASPS in New York and full of recognizable if fallible characters (and a couple of appalling ones!), it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, about the haves and have-nots and the nuances in between, and the insanity of first love--Pineapple Street is a scintillating, wryly comic novel of race, class, wealth and privilege in an age that disdains all of it.
by Weike Wang
Riverhead Books, 2024. 215 pages. Fiction.
Keru and Nate first meet in college, brought together by a joke at a Halloween party and marrying a few years later. Misfits in their own families, they find in each other a feeling of home. Keru is the only child of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents who hold her to impossible standards even as an adult. Nate is from a rural, white, working class family that has never trusted his intellectual ambitions or - now - the citizenship status of his "foreign" wife. Nevertheless, some years into their marriage, Keru and Nate find themselves incorporating their families into two carefully planned vacations. The results are disastrous and revealing. First in a cozy beach house on Cape Cod, and later in a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, the couple is forced to confront the hidden truths at the core of their relationship. Alongside their giant sheepdog Mantou, Keru and Nate navigate visits from in-laws, a sibling, and surprising new friends, all while trying to determine if they have what it takes to make themselves and each other happy.
JK
