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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The new book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner starts like this, "Do you want to hear the story with a terrible ending?" Between you and me, who wouldn't want to keep reading? A terrible ending is not what you think. The book Long Island Compromise starts with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher in his driveway which is attached to his very, very nice home on Long Island. Carl is very rich. He's really rich. His father escaped from Poland with the idea that he turned into a fortune. It wasnt plastics, but close. Polystyrene aka styrofoam. Back to the kidnappers. They want $250,000. This was 1980 and it would be about $4 million today. The wife Ruth pays it. He comes home. Two men are charged. Not all the money is found but wait, we are only on page 22 of a 440 page novel. The story follows the Fletcher family through the years beyond the torturous kidnapping plus a lifetime of extreme wealth.

We see it through the adult children, the bacchanalian one, the nervous one, the bright one. It all comes to a point when their grandmother dies and each has to return home where they find out the family's money has run out. How will Beamer pay for his $85,000 rehab stay? Will Nathan pull himself out of a hole after investing with a shady advisor? What about Jenny who can't decide whether to be a socialist, a Marxist, a whateverist?

This book has bdsm, bar mitzvahs, arson, organ failure, lying and more from the mind of Taffy Brodesser-Akner Kirkus Reviews calls it a great american jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth. A triumph. Taffy is the author of Fleishman Is in Trouble and a beloved writer for the New York Times. I selected Taffy's novel to read as part of our all of it summer reading challenge. We're challenging our listeners to read four books in four different categories we've chosen.

You can head to our Instagram @allofitwnyc to see the categories and find out how to participate in the challenge. I've selected Taffy's book for the category a book set in New York. You can do it too, or you can select it from the category a book you heard about on All Of It. Taffy, welcome.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It is so great to be here, Alison. Thank you so much. You just reminded me that the elevator pitch for my book requires an elevator that will go up so many stories. It's one of those buildings whose elevators is always broken like in the Skyline, the new ones. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You were actually working on this book here when you went to write Fleishman Is in Trouble. You put this one aside. What was the original concept for Long Island Compromise?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The original concept for Long Island Compromise was a question about money. I was in Russia doing a story about the US's only male synchronized swimmer and I was there for twelve days. My young children were home wondering where their mother was. I was trying to make ends meet. I had this rage at all of the wealthy people I knew growing up. I wanted to pour all that rage into this one question I would have an answer in this book, which is, are you better off with money and never having to feel afraid? Or is it better to be able to pick yourself up by your own steam and support yourself and make your own ends meet and survive by yourself?

That's the question that I thought I was asking. Are your children doomed by your money when I started writing it, but that's not what I ended up with. What I ended up with was the story that I guess I keep returning to that I was addressing in Fleishman, which was, what happens after trauma? How are we supposed to move on? Can you move on? Is there a way to ever forget the things that happen to you? Do your children survive the things that happened to you?

Alison Stewart: The kidnapping is based on a 1974 real story. Jack Tysch. He was kidnapped from his home near Kings Point, held for what would be $4 million today. He was returned home. You got his okay?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I did. He's a family friend. When I was writing this book, which I was writing before Fleishman, I couldn't get this kidnapping out of my mind. A kidnapping asks this great question about money, which is the very money that saved you also put you in danger in the first place. Which is it? Is it good or is it bad? It's as impossible to answer as the other questions that I was asking about money. That's the spoiler. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: When did you realize this would be a good catalyst to start your novel?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I didn't realize it. It just kept finding its way in. It felt like the big event in what could have been a very rudderless novel if I was just talking about money and wealth and Long Island, the suburbs. I needed something to start and there was no version where this wasn't in it, and I couldn't escape it. Again, it was before Fleishman. It was before I understood that the idea that a writer not include all of the things she knows, even about people she cares about, was inevitable. It was inevitable that I would include it.

I asked Jack for his blessing. He gave it to me, which is very, very nice because it really is terrible to know a writer. It really is terrible that somebody might return you to a horrible period of your time in your 80s. Also, Jack was writing his own memoir at the time, which has since come out. It's called Operation Jackknap, and it is excellent.

Alison Stewart: The kidnapping is in the chapter titled-- Let me say I write the dybbuk?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The dybbuk.

Alison Stewart: A dybbuk in the works. I'm going to ask you to read two paragraphs that explain what the dybbuk is, rather than me just asking you.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: There's a dybbuk in the works was an old Fletcher saying about machinery at the factory that had begun to malfunction, one that Carl's father Zellig, had imported from Poland. The phrase was a cross-contamination of Zellig's factory work and the terrible fables told in the Jewish ghettos that either warded off or provoked unexplainable happenstance, like an infestation of ants in a sugar bowl or cossacks murdering your siblings right in front of you.

A dybbuk, as tradition tells us, is a miserable soul that cannot progress to a heavenly rest and instead stays on earth and takes over someone else's body, displacing the person's soul in order for the miserable soul to do its final bidding. If an aspirator at the factory was malfunctioning, Zellig said there was a dybbuk in the works. If a group of cables all started snapping in short succession, there was a dybbuk in the works. It was Carl who brought this phrase home to his own family, extending it beyond the confines of the factory.

When the electricity went out during a storm, there was a dybbuk in the works. When an alarm clock stopped working for no apparent reason. When Nathan couldn't form a sentence for his stammering. When the school called home about Bernard's behavior. When Jenny would refuse to engage in the feminine activities that Ruth thought a daughter should be eager to engage in. Shopping, makeup, learning to bake. What Bernard would later refer to as the great all-night nose Job war of 1998. There was a dybbuk in the works, a time when things went more wrong than mere physics and logic could account for.

Alison Stewart: That's Taffy Brodesser-Akner reading from her book Long Island Compromise. What do you consider the dybbuk in the story?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think the dybbuk in the story is this unknowable. That's such a good question. It's the unknowable source of everything that's going wrong for them. Is it the kidnapping, or is the kidnapping born from what Zelig did in Poland? Is what Zelig did in Poland born from something we don't even know about? All we do know is that the dybbuk makes its way through each of these characters and in the end, they make peace with it.

Alison Stewart: There's no Middle Rock, Long Island.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: There is no Middle Rock, Long Island.

Alison Stewart: I looked at maps. I checked it out.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I have a good lawyer.

Alison Stewart: It's going off context clues. It could be Oyster Bayish or Sandpointish we'll say.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: You could say. You could wonder if it's Great Neck because my father is from Great Neck. He lives there now. Jack Tysch was kidnapped out of Great Neck. It does combine all the elements of all of the what is so horrifically called the Gold Coast of Long Island. Cancel yourself. It is called the Gold Coast of Long Island, but I briefly lived in Dix Hills when my parents were married for a few years. It was all very different, but it was governed by the same dybbuk.

Alison Stewart: What's the unsaid part about the people who live let's say on the Gold Coast who are so very rich? What's the unsaid part?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The unsaid part? You mean unsaid in the book?

Alison Stewart: Unsaid in your life's experience that you were able to use for the book.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Let me think about that for a second. What I think about money is that if you always had it, you will never understand the fear for survival that most of us have. If you do understand the fear for survival that most of us have, no amount of money will cure you of it.

Alison Stewart: That's what Ruth says to her daughter. You're a rich girl. I have money, but I'm not a rich girl.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: When they say about writing that you should be really specific and that's how you get to be universal, I've heard that before because this is a very New York book.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I'm hoping you're right about that. For regional, post-regional sales.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, what does that mean for someone in Iowa who's reading this story?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I guess what I always turn to is how much I loved the corrections. I had not yet been to St. Louis, which I think is what the town there is doing business as. I've read stories that take place in Poland. I have read stories that take place in space. I guess the question I always have is every story has to face the burden of specificity so that the reader could find themselves in it. I guess my question would be for the reader, is there something that stops you from thinking of New York as a valid place?

It's so interesting to me that New York and wealth are both these elements in a novel or in a TV show that a network, a publisher worry out loud that they are that will alienate a reader or a viewer. I guess I'm not alienated by it. When I was making the TV show version of Fleishman-- I making it, of course, with a lot of help. It occurred to me that the only time you ever really see the Upper East Side post a Woody Allen movie. The only time you ever see the Upper East Side in TV lately, someone has to get murdered.

In order for you to look at that kind of wealth, somebody has to get murdered. Whereas I grew up, my mother, after we went to sleep, or she thought we went to sleep, would watch Dynasty. She felt like we had so little money that she just wanted to watch people in fur coats and limousines. Comically rich people being comically rich.

Alison Stewart: The Fletcher family makes their money through polystyrene. Styrofoam. Why styrofoam?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: First of all, I have this affection for the post-war Jewish or Italian or Irish factory invented from need. The least glamorous job you could have. We are going to put wall-to-wall carpeting in all the schools. We are going to air-condition them all. Styrofoam, which is something people use a lot and is terrible for the environment. The thing I loved about it was that it's called insulation.

It protects even as it destroys the things it is trying to protect you from without any editorial commentary on whether or not those things deserve to be destroyed. I liked it too much as a metaphor. These people who live inside this deadly styrofoam, which is maybe capitalism or late capitalism, that you live inside it and you are protected while the world falls apart around you.

Alison Stewart: You did a lot of research into Styrofoam. What happens [crosstallk]

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I did. I'm a journalist. The easiest parts of the book for me were the parts where you just have to go to a factory and say, "Can I look around?" People are so nice when you ask those things. Or you call up a chemist and you say, "What would happen if a factory burned down?" Or you call up someone who went to Yale and you say, "What was the union like there?" People are so generous. I'm writing right now the introduction to a new edition of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I'm really excited about it because it's the first time I'm reading about Tom Wolf's process and his process was to understand that the old write what you know adage only takes you so far. It's really mostly write what you think. Then how do you fill out the rest of the book? With reporting. Of course, I'm also a reporter.

Alison Stewart: You are listening to my conversation with author Taffy Brodesser-Akner about her new novel, Long Island Compromise. It is out today. We'll have more with Taffy after a quick break. Stay with us.

[music]

You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. Let's continue my conversation with author Taffy Brodesser-Akner about her new novel, Long Island Compromise. It follows the wealthy Fletcher family coping with the aftermath of the kidnapping of their father, Carl Fletcher, and the realization that the family fortune is just about gone. The novel is out today and I've selected it to be one of my picks for the all of it summer reading challenge. I picked this novel as a category a book about or set in New York. Here's more of my conversation with Taffy.

[music]

All right. There are so many characters in this book, so we'll just concentrate on the Fletchers. Carl and Ruth are the parents and then their children are Beamer, Nathan, and Jenny.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe Ruth, the wife of Carl Fisher? Because moms play an important part of the story.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Ruth Fletcher is the quintessential person in a terrible position. She was poor. She married this guy knowing that it would mean safety for the rest of her life and then he's kidnapped and traumatized. She feels that it is her punishment for making such a devil's bargain that she has to take care of him in his traumatized state for the rest of his life, not be a great mother. Or the version of being a great mother was that she took care of Carl.

Of course, she's in this impossible position because she thought what she wanted was safety but then she raises these children, who themselves are the products of never having had the fears she has and she can't even relate to them. She looks at these children and does not know who they are because they haven't struggled the way she has and she hates them a little for it.

Alison Stewart: In your character building, you give people different behaviors.One of the things Ruth has the tick. When someone says something she doesn't like or she doesn't agree with like the mental health issues She says, "Ah, Sigmund Freud over there." Or the daughter is being dramatic. She says, "Oh, you're being Sarah Bernhardt over there." What made you give her this saying?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I love to listen to people talk. When I overhear something that is not the exposition of information, but a true character moment. I grew up going to this pool club. It just was a pool with a concrete block. It was a bunch of Jews sitting around and deciding whether or not they'd eaten long enough ago that they could go back into the pool. That's all I remember. Is hours and hours of debating whether or not you could go swimming now. I would hear all of these little sayings, and I did not know that I was collecting them but then Ruth came out fully formed, and that's what she said.

Alison Stewart: The Fletchers are living this great American story. They make money. They spend it on their family. We learn it's a lot more complicated than that. You have to do what you have to do even if it edges towards meanness. Why does Carl's family-- They tell lies about where they got their money from or how their money was made?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why do they tell lies?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Because the truth is so ugly. What people do when they are trying to survive, they commit acts of desperation. It's one thing to commit an act of desperation when you're trying to flee Poland. It's harder to explain your act of desperation when you are merely trying to get through the day. I think that dishonesty and the assassins that live in the house with you, that hold a gun over you, that kidnap you and don't let you actually say what is going on in the room. That is why we lie. Because we know we'll get shot if we say it. Sorry to extend that metaphor to death.

Alison Stewart: The book is full of bar mitzvahs and two-day burials. There's an angle for the nose jobs. Some words I won't use.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I love that. I love the angle for the nose job.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: As you were writing this, how did you fall into archetypes of Jewish folks versus stereotypes?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I guess I didn't even think about it. I just thought about what generation is it that I'm writing about right now? What did they sound like and what did they do? I think stereotype comes from laziness and maybe a little bit of contempt. Maybe the answer to your question is, I don't have any contempt for these people. I am these people. When I read a review saying that some of them are unlikable, I can't even understand what they're talking about. Which I guess means that I'm not likable. I guess I'd be a terrible character.

Alison Stewart: Or you've fallen in love with them. It's nice to spend time falling in love with the characters.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: That's nice. Thank you for saying that. I feel like it is a strange time to write specifically about anybody. The only thing I can do, the only way I could justify anything I write because so much of what I read right now is not art. I'm not being derisive about it. I'm saying it's not art. It's about the anxiety of making art, which is the story of our time. The fact that we now know that whatever we write right now, in ten years, will be abhorrent to a new generation. What are you going to do? You're either not going to write, or you're just going to know that I'll have a good ten years. That's all you have as a writer now in this culture. The only thing I can defend is writing about who I am and what I've seen.

Alison Stewart: Beamer. Real name Bernard.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: No one calls him that. Now, Beamer is short for BMW?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: No, people thought it was short for BMW.

Alison Stewart: Oh, thank goodness. I thought because BMWs built Nazi German cars.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: No. The thousand pages that were left on the cutting room floor have debates about whether or not you should drive a German car or if it's the ultimate triumph to drive a German car. Beamer is named Beamer because-- Some people think it's because that was his first car and some people think it is because his eyes are like high beams and people are like deer in headlights when they look at him, especially women. Actually, it's because his beloved younger sister could not pronounce Bernard as a baby and called him Beamer and it took.

Alison Stewart: Beamer is a co-writer of film franchise. He did it with his friend. His friend did all of the work. Beamer was a cheerleader, I guess. Beamer decides he wants to continue the series on the guy's not having it. Do you think he can actually write a good series? Write a good sequel, prequel, whatever it is.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think he is trying to write something in the realm of the fourth in a die-hard series, back when there's no real hope in this current day for anyone greenlighting that project. Can he write a good version of that? Probably not. The real question is, can he write a great version of the story that he wants to write? The question that he grapples with, probably without knowing it, the question I grappled with was, it's a lot of risk to write personally. It is a lot of vulnerability.

The reason I do it is because the thing that hangs over my head is having a different job than the one that I want to do. If you have all the money in the world, why would you take a risk? Why would you be vulnerable? He comes very, very close to understanding that. That's where I'll leave it because I don't want to spoil anything.

Alison Stewart: When we first meet him, he's really enjoying a dominatrix.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: He is. Two.

Alison Stewart: He says after one instance in her slow hand, the pain was excruciating. It was unfathomable. It was what he had been looking for his entire time.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Beamer hires dominatrixes, dominatrixi to what they think is cause him pain but actually what he's doing is reenacting a kidnapping over and over. That's not a service you can ask for, whereas a dominatrix is a mainstream service that you can ask for. Then one of his dominatrixes goes into massage training and does this strange massage that pulls you apart. In there, he finds that all he had ever wanted was to sit in his pain for a long enough period of time that he could understand it and hold it in his hands. For 45 minutes while she gives him this terrible massage, he has it.

Alison Stewart: He has an idea for a film. He gets really carried away with it is what we'll say, leave it there. How far did you want to go in his mental decline over the course of this experience?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I wanted him to divorce himself from reality in a major way. The first time I wrote this novel, when I first wrote it, he was a studio executive. He became a screenwriter when I became a screenwriter. A lot of his anxieties about his success and about screenwriting were my anxieties when I was writing the television show version of Fleishman. What I also noticed is that it's very easy to lose any sense of reality when you're talking about these projects, because forget Fleishman.

You go on to talk about an idea and someone will say, "Oh, you should attach that person to this idea." He's trying to package this idea which is a great way to avoid writing it. I think that's what Beamer's doing there. Is he has the idea. He has the theme. He knows it's going to be brilliant. He knows it's going to be thematically charged. Before he puts pen to paper, why doesn't he find a director? Why doesn't he find a star for it? Why doesn't he figure out a way to make it before he has to write it? Because writing, as I was doing, felt like the hardest thing in the world.

Alison Stewart: Nathan is a well-meaning soul. He can't get out of his own way. He's a lawyer. He looks for loopholes that lets big business usurp small ones. There's this interesting back-and-forth he has with a newly minted partner. It's Dominic Romano. They debate who has it harder, Jewish immigrant family or an Italian immigrant family. What did you want to explore with that exchange?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: In that exchange, I was not exploring the differences in ethnicity especially where I grew up. I was a late teenager when I found out that Italians and Jews are not the same people from just different regions. It did not occur to me. What they're actually talking about is being without money and being with money. Nathan, the Jewish character, comes from money, and his partner friend does not.

Alison Stewart: He is bullied by another guy named Mickey, who says he's going to make it big investing his money for him. We can see where this is going.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Only if your eyes are open you can see where it's going.

Alison Stewart: He's like, "This guy's listening to Joe Rogan." The whole thing. Why can't Nathan see it?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Because the book has the theory of priorities that my therapist has given to me, which is that there are a million different decisions to make in a day and you always make the decision based on your priorities. His priority is safety. Safety comes in so many different modes, and one of them is not being beaten up by your childhood best friend who has just started an investment firm and is clearly doing some weird stuff, but you could just make it go away if you invest and stop having him harangue you.

I think Nathan chooses safety in all of these different ways that are not safety, therefore proving-- I don't know. Is there such a thing as safety? Can money buy you safety? I don't think the book thinks it can, but it does buy you a lot of good stuff. It does buy you a lot of things that add to your safety. I don't know.

Alison Stewart: Jenny is the brains in the family, but she lacks-- Is it emotional intelligence? When she's young, she has a hard time making friends. She can't quite engage with people.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: She can't make a decision because shes born after the kidnapping and she spent her whole childhood determined to define herself outside of the trauma of this family. That when she finally finds herself on her own, the decisions become too big for her. My friend Rayhan taught me this phrase, semantic evacuation.

It's a linguistic term for when you look at a word for too long and it just falls apart. Sometimes you're looking at the word boat and you're like, boat. What could this mean? How could this signify a vessel on the sea? That's what she's done with her life, is she's treated it as so precious in a way that people who have to work for their survival don't have the luxury to. She's treated it as so precious that she can't make any decision because she has the one life, but the decisions feel too big.

Alison Stewart: I read somewhere you put torture them Post-it on your computer.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Who was it hard to torture?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: All of them. The reason the Post-it says torture them, my kids love it. They make fun of me for it. The reason the Post-it is on the computer is to remind you that it is your obligation as a storyteller to bring everyone to their lowest point because once you get them there, it is so hard because you love them. I love every single one of these people. They are comprised of thoughts I've had and theories I've earned and pieces of me. Then my obligation as a storyteller is to just beat them up so that they can figure out a way to redeem themselves. That is something that I don't know if it comes naturally to anyone. It certainly doesn't come naturally to me so the Post-it endures.

Alison Stewart: I'm not going to explain what Long Island Compromise means. What people explain.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: This is a family show.

Alison Stewart: Then it turns into something else. It becomes clear that the family money's gone. Whose world do you think gets rocked the most?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: This is a strange answer, but I think the people around them.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The people around them. You mentioned that there are a lot of characters. Listener, please don't be afraid of that.

Alison Stewart: No. It's 440 pages and they're just coming and they're going and they're in and then they're back and then they come and they go. Anyway, continue.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It is hard. It took a long time to figure out how can you write about wealthy people and explain what your point of view on the wealth is if you are doing a novel that is a close third person on these five characters. The answer is through the people around them. Meg Wolitzer, who has become a dear friend, explained that to me.

Whereas my first novel had an actual journalist narrator speaking directly to the audience. I didn't want to do that this time. Her answer, because she has all the answers, was a very simple have someone in the corner just say what you want to say. Which seems elementary, but I am here for all elementary lessons.

Alison Stewart: Speaking of, what did you learn from Fleishman Is in Trouble that you're going to put to work this time when this has been adapted for screen?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: For screen? That's a great question, and I'm going to answer it technically. I'm not going to answer it thematically. I'm going to answer technically that when I wrote Fleishman, I had this misconception that there's so much money in television that it would also equal time. This is also so dumb that every time you write a scene and you change out of the previous scene, you have to change the lighting and you have to exhaust your cast and your directors, and you have to change their costumes and you have to exhaust everyone with this maximalist, bullion version of things.

This time I am going to know what the thing I'm writing might mean on the day we're on the set. They say on the day I'm going to be able to hold my head up high and look at everyone and say, "I tried to make this more humane for you." Everyone was so nice to me about how inhumane I was.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: They were very supportive, but I didn't know what I was doing.

Alison Stewart: You learn.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I did learn. I had so much support. I had a network and a studio that were rooting for me and producers who explained things to me. Still, there's stuff that it's only once you see it that you understand the physics of it. I had a cast who showed up for every crazy moment for it and was willing to try and was willing to do things that did not seem like they might work. It felt magical. It felt like-- Is it that the wind is at your back?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: That's the good one. You're right. When it's at your front, it's bad. Dust in your contact lenses. It felt like the wind is everyone trying for this one goal. It reminded me of a newsroom on election night but now imagine every night is election night. It's really tiring.

Alison Stewart: Good luck to you.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Thank you.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The book is Long Island Compromise. Thanks for coming.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Alison, it's such a pleasure to be here and see you again.

 

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