Long Island Compromise

Brodesser-Akner builds her second novel around an inciting event — the real-life-adjacent kidnapping of a Long Island patriarch — that she then largely sidelines, spending most of the book instead on how three grown siblings metabolize inherited wealth and inherited trauma into distinct forms of dysfunction. Reviewers flagged this as both the book's ambition and its liability: several praised the sentence-level comedy and caustic family dialogue as sharper than her debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, while others found the middle stretch repetitive, with the kidnapping's consequences arriving late and resolving in a rushed final quarter. The Fletchers' money functions less as backdrop than as the actual subject — what it insulates them from, and what it can't.