‘Too Much Hugging and Learning’
Welcome to the final installment of Beach Read Book Club’s discussion of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. Today, we’re tackling the end of the book and its many revelations. (If you need a refresher, catch up on parts one, two, three, and four.)
Let’s start with the reveal that Ike was the one who kidnapped Carl. Did you pick up on any clues ahead of time that that was going to be the way this story shook out? How do you feel about the fact that readers don’t see the family discover the identity of the kidnappers?
Emily Gould: It didn’t make sense to me. I thought that the mystery of the kidnapping would be a major plot-driver in the book, then it’s just not. This isn’t not a mystery novel, but it fails on the level of providing any bread crumbs to the reader to piece together throughout the other sections. There’s nothing that we see in Ike that would hint at this being a possible thing that the character would have done. In the real world, things happen for no reason all the time, but in the world of a novel, you kind of have to have a reason.
Jason P. Frank: It seems to me like the author is not a master of shock. You want to feel shocked then like it all makes sense. I was kind of left going, “Huh, that’s really what you’re going with? Okay!”
Julie Kosin: It worked for me because the authorities had determined Carl was in the factory for the duration of his kidnapping. Ike kept going, “I can’t believe he was there right under my nose and I didn’t know.” Sure, there are many places in this book where there could have been a more nuanced approach to Ike. But the fact that his has that conversation with Jenny about the desperation really crystallized the way that Ike’s family had to face the consequences of the kidnapping, too.
Kathryn VanArendonk: I had the same reaction. I wasn’t bowled over by shock. I was willing to accept that that character had been hanging out in the background the whole time. I was quite invested in the factory as both an idea and a real place that they are stuck with, the idea of this thing that has all this value that creates their worth that then is this toxic pit that they can’t escape. It is so on the nose, but it makes sense; this is also how America works.
Cat Zhang: I just wanted a little bit more indication of some greed on Ike’s part, some resentment. We have talked about the need for more of an outside perspective — that would have been really helpful. This feels too tidy, like a cute little trick. It is believable and I do like the fact that he can’t spend any of the money that’s buried, but you could have set it up better.
I liked the reveal that Zelig stole the Styrofoam recipe from the other guy as opposed to being granted it and to carrying on this man’s legacy.
Zach Schiffman: One thing about the kidnapping — you can tell that the author is nervous to go too deep into that because she’s borrowing the story. It feels like she doesn’t want to glamorize it in the reveal of it because it’s true.
Kathryn: There’s a fear of being exploitative, a completely understandable need to be like, “No, these are real people and this is very sensitive.”
Julie: My reading was that the whodunnit is the least important part of the puzzle: It doesn’t matter who did this, what matters is that it happened. There’s a world in which Taffy didn’t tell us who did because they don’t know that answer in real life, either, and I wouldn’t have been mad about that. The way that she sneaks it in, it’s kind of like getting stabbed by the person standing next to you, and they walk away before you even realize what happened.
I think she’s afraid to examine Carl’s psyche. She expects you to already realize what this has done to him, and that’s why we’re talking about everyone else around him. Which takes us to that Iron Claw–ass death scene when he goes to heaven or whatever and is meeting his parents and getting absolution. This is such a weird trend in pop culture of late, depicting what a person experiences the moment they die. Are you trying to give the reader or viewer catharsis? I was so turned off by it, then immediately thrilled about the Ike revelation.
Jason: I didn’t want this book to have more definitiveness. And then it tells you what happens when you die, the one thing that is unknowable in the world.
In the ending, I really liked when she bends narratives back around on each other. I love that we found out that Zelig killed Chaim. We got to feel the emotion of someone else correcting a narrative that we had already heard. I love when she allows stories and truth to be bendy. Having an omniscient narrator tell me what happens when a person dies is the opposite of that.
Zach: Something that really bothered me: How rude for him to die at the bar mitzvah! There’s also no mention of how deeply traumatizing that is going to be for Nathan’s kids forever.
Kathryn: You can’t throw a bar mitzvah in his family anymore. These kids should have figured that out by now.
Zach: Someone comments that it’s nice they planned the bar mitzvah around Phyllis’s dedication. Then for the funeral to have been the next day — they all would die if they had a dedication, a bar mitzvah, and a shiva to plan in one week. They would collapse without a doubt.
Julie: Is it possible to schedule a funeral that fast? If he dies that night and then you have the funeral the next morning?
Kathryn: Yeah, because you have to do it quickly.
Zach: If a Jewish person dies on a Wednesday, the funeral has to happen Thursday because they won’t do it on Friday or Saturday. They know how to do it.
One thing I’ll say just as a personal opinion, a bar mitzvah at the house is tacky. Rent a venue, you can afford it.
Julie: But they have the enormous lawn!
Zach: It’s rude. It’s like, Oh, you sleep here? Go to a venue, get a country club.
Julie: That section starts with “The bar mitzvah ceremony was a rousing, unmitigated success. Flawless, complete triumph for a family that endured a difficult year but had gotten through gracefully.” So you’re just not gonna tell people that the patriarch of the family died?
Kathryn: This is a narrator problem. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to read the tone of that line.
Julie: We need to talk about the other big ending piece, the factory burning down. That was way too much for me. Again hitting you over the head with the symbolism. I love Marjorie, I can’t wait to see which actress gets to run around in her nightgown in the Apple TV+ version of this. But the big finale building-burning set piece is such a trope now (it reminded me of Little Fires Everywhere) and it also felt like deus ex machina — the moment comes out of nowhere, it’s not set up well, and they get to take the insurance money and pay off the families so it’s all good and fine.
Kathryn: The reason that I like the factory — the real American story-ness of it — is that it remains a toxic waste pit forever and eventually a Chinese company buys the land, does a shitty job of pretending to environmentally remediate it, then it becomes another factory that is in fact worse for the environment, then the family is shit out of luck. This is the shitty, bendy truth of how that could actually play out.
Earlier in the funeral scene — where Majorie is the character who just stands up and says all of this shit that nobody else is willing to say — she’s a useful device, a tension-release valve who is not fully a character. And she didn’t have to be fully a character because she’s losing it. So instead she can be this Greek-chorus figure.
Zach: I also really liked the scene when Ruth goes to Marjorie’s apartment and how she was inconsistent in the scene. She was angry then sad then losing it. Whoever plays Ruth is going to win an Emmy for that scene. This was a dialogue scene that really felt juicy and fulfilling.
How did the diamond reveal land for you? And what do we make of this “terrible ending” that was promised to us at the beginning of the book?
Emily: Why do we have to end with the family having their wealth intact and everyone’s just going to be okay? Why did we have to go through all that for things to arrive back at the status quo? Why did anyone in this book get to have anything remotely like a happy ending? There’s no precedent for it.
Kathryn: The idea from the beginning is that the problem is the money and the terrible ending is that they still have money. The cycles all continue and they are never forced to actually reckon with any of the damage that this has created for them. All of them feel, when they realize the money is gone, this moment of relief. And soon they’re like, “Actually this fucking sucks, we need all our money back,” but there is this moment where this thing is no longer the pressure of your life. So the terrible ending is that they still have it.
Zach: The diamonds felt like another made-for-TV moment because it’s so visual. I think it would have been interesting if it was some Nathan-y loophole that they had found in paperwork and that’s what keeps the money, as opposed to this. It’s like Mario Bros.
Jason: To make it a satisfyingly terrible ending, there needed to be hugging and no learning. The fact that Nathan learns how to control his money and that Jenny decides to live with rich people to not feel bad about herself and ends up with Brett — there’s too much hugging and learning. It needs to be the Seinfeld thing: This a terrible ending, fuck these people, they can keep doing the terrible things that they were doing. You can’t let them break cycles.
Emily: We would have wanted to see their potential for being able to break cycles a lot earlier in the book in order to earn that happy ending
Zach: The only part of the ending that I loved was the bamboo candlesticks. I found that really beautiful.
Emily: The TV adaptation of this one is going to be way better than the book, à la Fleishman. Because they’re gonna cast it so well that we will get invested in the characters in spite of their … everything.
Kathryn: And they’re gonna have to restructure it. The character stories are going to have to be threaded, which would have fixed a lot of my reading experience of this novel. You would have to balance the kids more. If you were giving Beamer and Nathan these kinds of lived moments, like where Nathan meets Alyssa, you’re going have to find similar moments like that for Jenny. They’re going have to take up similar kinds of space in the story and the whole thing is going to be forced to level set against itself in a helpful way.
Julie: In the book, Beamer and Nathan’s entire story line takes place in the present day leading from Phyllis’s death through to the memorial and bar mitzvah. But Jenny’s is her whole life. That goes back to our problem with Jenny’s characterization — Taffy tried to create a character out of the story of her past, while with Beamer and Nathan, we as readers got to live in the moment with them. The actress playing Jenny is going to have to play someone in high school through age 37.
Also, I just wanted more Phyllis, the character who is dictating this entire family’s existence. She was such a caricature and there just wasn’t enough space for her.
Zach: I could have read a lot more about Ruth and Phyllis becoming close. I found it really compelling that they were forced to, that Ruth became her in ways.
Jason: It felt like one of the few relationships that was the true subversion, where the mother-in-law and the mother got along really well.
To finish us off, which moments or characterizations in the book felt true or made you laugh or will you remember?
Zach: I was never offended by the nose-job stuff. I thought it was funny every time and true to the way I grew up. The standard joke is that during winter break like five to six girls will come back in January with Band-Aids on their noses. The pressure of everyone having to get another nose job has not been put into words this well.
Emily: I’ll always treasure the memory of reading this book at the beach in a day and a half. It was a fun book to whiz through really quickly.
Kathryn: When the narrator’s voice hits, it really hits. You are hanging out with somebody who is a little bit cheap and a little just gossipy and wants to tell you all of the dirt about these people. This sense of it being so readable — that is why. Because it has this really buzzy, fun quality to how nosy everyone is — not to go off of a nose-job thing.
Jason: We didn’t really get into the title of it. I liked the way that it twisted and turned and constantly fell in on itself. It started off as an anal-sex joke — Taffy clearly thinks that anal sex is very very funny. It is brought up many times as a punch line. But I did think that the constant twisting around in the title was good. I did not love “but maybe the real Long Island compromise was the friends we made along the way” at the end as a prose issue. That was a little cliché, and I’m surprised an editor did not catch that.
Julie: I’m probably gonna remember the Beamer stuff, unfortunately. The absolute chaos and stress of reading that while I had the flu was really a mind-altering experience.