Good News: Two awesome books, one after another. That's a wrap for 2024. Cheers!
Bad News: My TPL Branch is closed "until further notice." Building problems. Stay tuned.
Taffy Brodessor-Akner. Long Island Compromise. USA: Random House Large Print, 2024.
You've never met a family like this, I say confidently. An utterly amazing book, the story defines inherited trauma in the most comprehensive, absorbing way. Uber-wealthy factory owner, Carl Fletcher of Middle Rock, Long Island, was kidnapped by unknown thugs causing his wife Ruth a desperation race to collect the ransom cash with Cousin Arthur's help. Their two confused little boys, Nathan and Bernard ("Beamer"), were dragged along in Ruth's wake, she half out of her mind with anxiety but delivering the money on time. When returned home, Carl was never the same after the agonizing week of mental torture. Ruth was then pregnant with daughter Jenny. Each member of that extended family unknowingly, obliviously, exhibits the effects of Carl's experience. How the three children in particular, as they age, handle their wealth is quite individual, each wanting to be regarded as more than a shallow trust fund bore, each failing.
The talented author conjures the tribal aspect of upper class American Jewish families; it's a parodic but huge, exuberant slice of life from an expert. Beamer is a struggling screenwriter who married a shiksa, Noelle, anathema to the unforgiving Fletcher women who uphold the unwritten rules. A long sexual scene near the beginning is black, far too graphic for me, but it serves to open up this man's psychosis. Descriptions of the idle lives of rich housewives are a hoot; descriptions of Beamer's frantic addiction to drugs – any drugs at all – are painful. Nathan is a perennially anxious hypochondriac, married to Alyssa, at times a mirror of his now zombie-like father. Jenny totally rejects living in the luxury lane and the security of gated estates, giving her money away, thus alienating family. Brodessor-Akner savages every trope about Jews in their own words, and yet—the sympathetic intimacies, the reckless excesses, the satire, the periods of harrowing suspense—she rivets your attention.
If you assiduously store details of the fatal twists around this family you will know, ultimately, who really arranged Carl's kidnapping, the terror that started it all. The family believes that after all, it emerged safely after the episode, earning recognition for survival. When the financial tables turn spectacularly, can any of them deal with it? Densely packed, this is a saga of reckoning.
Bits
▪ "I wish I were dead right now," his mother answered. "Can you imagine that you made your mother wish she were dead?" (123)
▪ His mother and grandmother, for as long as he remembered, had been a duo of huddled, conniving manipulator worrywarts whose primary job was to manage the ongoing crisis of his catatonic father, and then raise Beamer and his siblings with whatever energy they had left over, which was none. (129)
▪ Of course, their father's crying only made Nathan sob harder, which made the pews shake, which made Jenny look up to the ceiling in annoyance. (135)
▪ Marjorie had the appearance of a frayed wire, a thing in a constant, dangerous state of unravel. (138)
▪ "Beamer, do you hear me? Don't do this. Write your own thing. The thing you obviously have always needed to write." (222)
▪ Nathan Fletcher had grown from that little boy making twenty-four-hour four-point contact with his mother during his father's kidnapping into not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention. (268-9)
▪ Next to him was a hand sanitizer dispenser, but a thing people don't think about is how dirty the actual dispensers can be if they're touched mostly by people who are seeking out hand sanitizer. (383)
▪ They continued to perpetuate the environment-destroying, climate-changing, downward-spiral-economy-sustaining, soul-crushing American ideal that the way they'd been raised was the best way to live. (477-8)
▪ "I cannot think of what is more a reaction to your family than working to unionize people. It's, like, poetic levels of irony here." (489)
▪ How she'd watch her three children flailing as they aimed to find meaning in a life where they didn't have to work for anything. She felt bad for them, because once you're born that way, even if you lose everything, the way they just had, you never feel the fire of survival in you. (547)
Dennis Lehane. Since We Fell. USA: CCC/HarperCollins, 2017.
A serendipitous random grab (although I've read other Lehane books). It's a long book, a mystery with a Grand Love Story. The first part of the story dwells on the rise and fall of Rachel Childs as an intrepid, acclaimed journalist who suffers a severe breakdown after extensive reporting from ghastly conditions during Haiti's earthquake. Over time, her PTSD with its agoraphobia, and guilt, and shame at her weakness, are nursed by Brian, an exceptionally caring man she met and married. After a childhood deprived of real affection from her mother, Rachel had searched long and hard for the father she never knew, with little success but a collection of small, painful details. Mutual love with Brian is deeply binding for both. She's on the mend when she learns that Brian's regular international business trips are a sham. It gets worse. And poof, he's gone. Can her fragile mental health handle such a betrayal?
Everything changes. But Rachel's trajectory is upwards despite moments of doubt and depression. Her best reporter instincts kick in, she's going to get to the bottom of whatever is happening, whatever she's been shielded from. The first shock comes from unsought advice about their special song: Since I Fell in Love with You. She cross-examines Brian's business partner, Caleb, but they both encounter brutality worse than the prowling rapists and killers of Haiti. Then a stunning event takes place. Its equally stunning follow-up will test the reader's scale of credibility—nonetheless it is action, excitement, murder. It's also deception, and not what she expected as Rachel becomes a person of definite interest to the police.
Can I even convey how deftly author Lehane finesses this plot? A master of psychological insight, he spins a breathtaking tale around two fascinating characters. Careful, now, not to pin a quote below that could give anything away.
Bits
▪ "If I ever tried to make contact, your mother told me, she'd tell the police that I was the man who raped her." (49)
▪ They could smell the dead three hours before they arrived. There was no infrastructure left, no aid, no government relief, no police to shoot looters because there were no police. (75)
▪ She looked at this man who was better than any she'd ever known, certainly kinder, certainly more patient, and the tears came, which only deepened her shame. (139)
▪ "Nothing's going on. Why would something be going on? It's raining like holy hell but otherwise just grabbing a drink with your partner." (180)
▪ "You thought I was living some kind of double life." (193)
▪ They could be waiting patiently on the other side of the door, exchanging glances, maybe even smirks, screwing their silencers onto their pistols, taking careful aim at the doorway, and waiting for the moment when she opened the door. (312)
▪ Rachel pocketed the gun and stood. ... And she knew she wasn't going to die to make life easier for Brian or Kessler or anyone else who assumed she was too weak for this world. (334)
▪ "He pulled the gun from my mouth and he made me look at her as the men dragged her off and he made me say the words." (369)
▪ "I'm from fucking San Pedro," Haya whispered, eyes on the doorway behind Rachel. (372)
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