Is This Anything?

Displayed prominently on a bookshelf in my living room is a framed cartoon by Liana Finck. The comic depicts two roughly-drawn figures with speech bubbles above their heads, with only one word exchanged back and forth: “Jews.” (The same word, placed in a parenthetical below the caricatures, wittily clarifies their identity.) This print has always struck me as a perfect skewering of me and the many people I know who, if denied the ability to use the word “Jews” or any of its cognates, would be rendered mute.

I thought of this image often while reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise; over the course of its 400-plus pages, we are nearly drowned in a flood of “Jewish” this and “Jewish” that. But oddly and significantly, as I reached the conclusion of the tome, I realized that Finck’s cartoon has more depth than Brodesser-Akner’s book, which struggles to say anything of substance about being a Jew in America today. If the cartoon carries almost novelistic weight, Long Island Compromise never reaches far beyond the level of a cartoon.

This is not to deny that the novel is, for the most part, a fun read. It manages to entertain even as the main characters—members of the wealthy Fletcher family of Middle Rock, an imagined Long Island suburb where the Jewish population exceeds 50% of the total—eventually wear on the reader. The novel opens with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher, owner of a polystyrene factory inherited from his Holocaust survivor father. He is released after his ransom is paid, but he is never the same: Once a formidable figure, he’s left a wreck of a man who can’t function in the world. In the wake of his trauma, his domineering mother, Phyllis, rules the family—her coldness is rivaled only by that of Carl’s wife, Ruth. After recounting Carl’s abduction, Long Island Compromise tells the story of his three children. Beamer, the eldest, is an unhappily married screenwriter whose professional star fades, triggering his descent into a life of drugs and sexual debauchery. Middle child Nathan is the straightest arrow of the three (which isn’t saying much): He’s a failure of a lawyer, a spineless individual in all regards, and father to twin sons stereotypically named Ari and Josh. The youngest child, Jenny, born after her father’s rescue, is brilliant, but unable to connect with anyone in her life, a detachment she attempts to make up for with her work as a left-wing organizer. The family is, to put it mildly, a mess, and Brodesser-Akner wrings much comedy and pathos out of their plight.

This is all well and good for a literary page-turner, but Long Island Compromise seems to have greater ambitions. Brodesser-Akner has sometimes shied away from the notion that the novel is defined by its Jewishness, saying, for instance, that she doesn’t think of this title or her previous novel Fleishman Is in Trouble as “Jewish books” so much as “books with Jews in them.” Yet the novel’s obsessive preoccupation with American Jewishness suggests that it takes the subject quite seriously—and has something to say about it. The Times was right to call this her “big American Reform Jewish Novel”; the question is what this collection of identity markers adds up to at this point in history.

Brodesser-Akner certainly knows her Jews. She paints an apt and amusing portrait of the Fletchers’ social world, replete with references to the bowling league of the women’s Zionist group Hadassah and to the Sisterhood of the family’s synagogue. The shul’s obsequious Rabbi Weintraub is at the beck and call of materfamilias Phyllis, owing to her affluence and largesse. Even just the names of the secondary characters kept me chuckling throughout the book; Sarah Messinger-Schlesinger was a particular favorite. But despite the novel’s copious allusions to Jewish life, it gradually emerges that Jewishness for the Fletchers—and within Long Island Compromise—is ultimately a hollow enterprise.

For the older generation, Jewishness manifests primarily as a close-minded suspicion of outsiders—a nasty, reflexive opposition to intermarriage and a pathological fear of antisemitism. (When Jenny entertains the idea of going to Berkeley, her grandmother insists that it’s filled with Israel-hating antisemites; curiously, Israel is otherwise almost totally absent from the novel.) But for the younger characters at the book’s center, it barely manifests at all beyond superficial signifiers. They are the fully deracinated children of the American Dream. Accordingly, the novel’s most extended engagement with Jewishness, Nathan’s twins’ lavish bar mitzvah, only highlights the completion of assimilation. The yarmulkes are emblazoned with the Knicks’ logo, and the religious ritual—itself an anemic, sentimental affair—is a mere prelude to a pageant of upper-class Americanness with a Jewish coating. The Fletchers are not alone in this syncretism, to be sure; the history of the Jews in America since the 20th century has been defined by this melding of worlds. But as we can see in this novel, while the collision once proved generative, we have arrived at a juncture where it has no content—a nullity that Brodesser-Akner seems less interested in interrogating than in simply reproducing.

At least one other critic—The Forward’s Mira Fox—likewise found Brodesser-Akner’s approach to American Jewish life wanting. But Fox argues that Jewishness in Long Island Compromise is less empty than exhaustingly familiar, a re-retreading of a Rothian mode of “visceral, all-consuming, generational anxiety.” Brodesser-Akner has confessed to a passion for Philip Roth, writing in the Times in 2018 that until she read him, she “didn’t really know what it meant to be a Jew.” But even as the novel bears his influence in its satirical approach to its often pathetic characters, all of this feels lacquered over its Jewish milieu rather than of a piece with it. While all three Fletcher children are screwed-up, they bear no specifically Jewish scars. If only the author would at least attempt to revive the tried and true mid-century trope of the Jewish neurotic, in which both words have equal weight. Alex Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, after all, could not be written about as he was if he were a gentile, nor could Bernard Malamud’s many miserable leads; they are haunted and molded by the particular upheavals and opportunities of their existence as Jews in America.

If Long Island Compromise is at all exemplary of contemporary American Jewish fiction, its failure as such forces us to ask: What happened to this once-eminent form and why? What was it that produced the works of Roth, Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Heller, Edward Lewis Wallant, and Grace Paley (and before them, Budd Schulberg, Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Mike Gold)? One key feature unites such works: the presence of a specifically Jewish history. For instance, in What Makes Sammy Run?—Schulberg’s 1941 chronicle of an unscrupulous, witty, and thoroughly obnoxious young Jew’s progress to the top of Hollywood—the narrator traces protagonist Sammy Glick’s success back to his origins in the Jewish slums of New York and his drive to leave his background behind forever. He is the archetype of the American-born child of Jewish immigrants, Jewish American history personified.

Many of these works are quite direct in their confrontation with distinct Jewish historical patterns of migration, oppression, and loss: To name just a few, Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) tracks the ascent of a greenhorn in the new land; Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961) follows a survivor of the camps, who now drags the weight of that experience with him everywhere he goes; and Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) recounts the story of the “Beilis affair,” a notorious 1913 blood-libel case in Kiev. But among the novels of the great age of Jewish fiction, even those most seemingly unconcerned with history bear the imprint of the Jewish past in the tale and in its telling. One example among many: In the climactic moment of the titular novella from Roth’s collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959), narrator Neil Klugman reads the letter that the father of his girlfriend, Brenda Patimkin, sent her after finding her diaphragm while she’s away at college. Neil makes a point of underlining the errors and odd capitalizations in the missive. This simple moment is a précis of American Jewish history. We understand without being told that Brenda’s father, the first-generation plumbing supply man, has not attended school; now his daughter is at a good college and on her way to full immersion in America. Neil, in his mockery of the letter and its writer, is a classic third-generation American Jew. The struggles of those who came before him are something to be left behind, and we can easily imagine that his children will do just that.

The characters at the center of Long Island Compromise are essentially those descendants, and the novel is marked by the glaring absence of Jewish history as a force in their lives. Sure, Grandpa Zelig fled the Holocaust, but this is more a convenient plot device than an albatross around the necks of his children and grandchildren. Indeed, these American Jews, like so many others who generations into their arrival in this country, are post-historical—or else the end of the Jewish American historical line. In Long Island Compromise as in many other recent works, this literary assimilationism has deprived Jewish fiction of its unique punch.

None of this is to say that the Jewish American writer is completely a thing of the past, or that no such writers have managed to wrestle with modern Jews’ relationship to (or severance from) their history. Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander, who place history at the center of their novels, still possess some of the force of their predecessors. Tova Reich’s My Holocaust (2007)—an ingenious satire about the Holocaust as a replacement for Judaism as a religion—seemingly solves the problem of the emptiness by probing it directly. But it is revealing that on The New York Times’ recent list of the “100 best books of the 21st century,” the one most freighted with Jewish history is Austerlitz, by the non-Jewish German writer W.G. Sebald, who was haunted by the crimes of his nation. While a few Jewish authors do appear—like Michael Chabon, for his stunning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, two of the spots belong to the old faithful Philip Roth, and there are more books by George Saunders (three) and Elena Ferrante (three) taken together than by all Jewish novelists combined.

There is nothing to be surprised about in this. As Yiddish and Ladino have faded, religion has lost its grip, and assimilation has run its course, Jewish writers have quite naturally had less experience of or interest in the particular textures of Jewishness that made the former wave of writers so great, and have understandably struggled to make much of what remains. Long Island Compromise proves that two qualities that haven’t been lost are humor and the ability to tell a tale, and that’s not nothing. But is it something?