Long Island Compromise

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 1

Part 1, Chapter 2

Part 1, Chapter 3

Part 1, Chapter 4

Parts 2-3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Wealth as a Barrier to Personal Development

In the second chapter of Part 1, Nathan learns about the concept of the “plastic hour,” in which people undergo suffering in order to grow into something better. As the potential loss of the family wealth looms over the Fletchers, Brodesser-Akner suggests that wealth insulates people from suffering and thus prevents growth.

When Charlie urges Beamer to write what he has always needed to say, he critiques Beamer’s access to wealth. Unlike Charlie, whose living has always depended on the success of his projects, Beamer has always had his wealth as a safety net, which means that he could have written anything with relatively low stakes. The same safety net also incentivizes his lack of effort. As Beamer writes the Santiago story over and over again, he is working through a private trauma rather than considering his audience. Beamer’s financial security does not insulate him from envy at the success that Charlie enjoys, however. He covets Charlie’s success, especially when Charlie’s greater clarity of vision allows him to steal Beamer’s life story from right under his nose.

Nathan similarly covets the success of his colleague, Dominic Romano, when the latter is made a partner at their law firm. Dominic earns his position after a grueling negotiation process with the town of Yellowton. Nathan thinks that he deserves the same position for reasons of tenure, but his value to the law firm falls far below Dominic’s. Like Beamer, the security net of his wealth has prevented him from aspiring to anything bigger than low-stakes land use cases until the moment Dominic gets promoted. When he tries to assert himself by bribing Lewis Squib, he unwittingly reveals that his idea of hard work at the law firm is synonymous with illicit activity. He undermines the integrity of his profession in order to get ahead.

Of all the Fletcher children, Jenny has the greatest potential to benefit from the plastic hour. She is eager to define herself outside of her wealth but is so insulated by her upbringing that she cannot imagine a life outside the privileged spheres that she knows. She becomes active in the Yale graduate student union, and she believes that she is doing valuable social justice work by leading a strike for higher wages and health benefits, but she has no response when Alice accuses her of wasting her talent and energy advocating for privileged academics like herself instead of helping working-class people.

Arthur’s return at the end of Part 2 ultimately frustrates the children’s potential to break away from their flawed, insulated perspectives and learn something new about the world. The Fletchers cannot grow unless they learn to stand on their own, without their inherited wealth to support them, and because Arthur helps Ruth find the hidden diamonds, they see no reason to commit to that growth in a meaningful way. They each move on to comfortable lives, but the brief comment on Jenny’s eventual death by suicide hints that the Fletchers remain ill-equipped to deal with the world. Ruth cannot help but compare her children to fattened calves, nurtured all their lives but essentially bred for slaughter.

Trauma and Familial Repression

After the terrifying ordeal of Carl’s kidnapping, his mother, Phyllis, urges him to imagine that the kidnapping happened not to him but to his body. This advice is emblematic of the Fletcher family’s approach to misfortune: Because the family’s mythology of success is paramount, any hardship must simply be ignored or wished away. The family depends on Carl as its chief breadwinner; therefore, he cannot be affected by what has happened to him. Phyllis essentially urges him to dissociate from the experience of his kidnapping, but he cannot do so. All he takes from her advice is an awareness that he must bear his burden in silence. When mental health experts awaken Carl and Ruth to the idea that he has gone through a traumatic experience, they both scoff at the suggestion that his experience might have changed him in any way.

The influence of repression persists among the three Fletcher children, who each experience symptoms of mental illness and emotional difficulties that they are reluctant to share with other members of their family. Nathan, for instance, has deep-seated anxiety and develops an addiction to buying insurance to insulate himself from bad luck. He holds back on telling Alyssa the truth about their financial situation because he is afraid of how she will react. Ironically, Alyssa’s anxiety is the one thing that makes Nathan feel calm. A similar phenomenon occurs in Nathan’s childhood when Carl is kidnapped: Since everyone acknowledges the state of emergency, Nathan feels at last that his internal emotional state matches the reality around him. He finds security in the validation of his anxiety, which he can only register when anxiety becomes the norm.

Jenny feels overwhelming shame when she experiences depression. She responds to this shame by retreating from the world and the people around her just when she most needs support. When Beamer challenges her motivations for working at the union, she excludes him from her support system and decides not to reach out to him when she hides in the brownstone. Learning that Beamer has been committed to a rehabilitation facility is the one thing that disrupts her self-imposed isolation: She reckons with the damage that affluence has done to both her and Beamer, and she takes action to help her brother.

Beamer tries to treat his own trauma through drugs and sex, but these become addictions that only deepen his unhappiness. The gratification he gets from these addictions allows him to avoid the real issues that haunt him. Dr. Lorna warns him that his secrets are preventing his marriage from being a functional partnership. Charlie’s secrecy around his addictions mirrors his inability to write the truth of his experiences, and he falls back on his drug addiction as soon as Charlie criticizes his latest Santiago screenplay. Only by facing his addictions and being open with Jenny about their shared trauma does Beamer begin to heal.

All three children manifest the signs of inherited trauma, especially since their behavioral patterns can be traced to the event of Carl’s kidnapping. By choosing to follow his mother’s advice and repress the trauma of his kidnapping, Carl inadvertently taught his children to repress their own trauma. Even more than their insulating wealth, this familial pattern of repression prevents their healing and growth.

The Illusory Promise of Certainty

Toward the end of the first part, Ruth considers whether she made the right choice by choosing Carl over her previous boyfriend, Dale. Dale’s impractical behavior made him appear less reliable, and she turned to Carl because she believed that with him, she could be certain of a stable, comfortable future. The unforeseeable event of the kidnapping proved her wrong, making clear that no one can be certain of an easy, happy future. Throughout the novel, the three Fletcher children and their parents struggle to absorb the shocks of the past and accept that no amount of money can guarantee a perfect future.

Beamer cannot help writing kidnapping plots into his screenplays because he is stuck trying to unpack his past. When Anya challenges him to tell a more meaningful Santiago story, she is nudging him toward reckoning with his outdated approach to storytelling. Charlie provokes this reckoning in a more aggressive way, pushing Beamer to realize that he must think of what else he wants to say or accept that he is not meant to be a writer. For Beamer, finding a new way of writing would mean facing the risk of failure. Instead of trying something new, he repeats the same plot again and again because it’s what he knows.

Nathan’s anxiety for the future prevents him from seeing dangers in the present moment. He purchases so much insurance to protect against any possible calamity that the cost of the insurance itself becomes calamitous. Nathan’s insurance addiction symbolizes the impossible quest for certainty. Ironically, Nathan’s fear of future uncertainty leads him to take inadvisable risks. He fails to see the signs of volatility that mark Mickey’s investment fund, and he relies on rash, impaired judgment in his meeting with Lewis Squib. By preventing him from facing uncertainty, his anxiety leaves him more exposed to misfortune than he would be if he were less afraid of risk.

Finally, Jenny fails to break away from a career in academic labor even after she becomes disillusioned with academia because she cannot see how to leverage her expertise toward a career anywhere else. She prefers a comfortably unsatisfying career in academia to an uncertain future elsewhere. Her meeting with the career development officer is a crucial turning point because the officer reminds her that change can take unrecognizable forms in different industries. The fact that Jenny chooses to spend her thirties working for the union points to the fact that she isn’t committed to social change as much as she is fearful of uncertainty. The moment she does break away from this fear, she can start to work toward defining an uncertain yet malleable future.