'The Long Island Commitment' joins the pantheon of great American novels

“Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner grabbed me from the first moment with this first line of her raucous and dazzling “Long Island Compromise,” an epic family saga that joins the ranks of great American novels like “The Corrections” and “Middlesex.”

Brodesser-Akner, a journalist, has long brought magic to the art of the profile, and her bestselling literary debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, made it necessary to read while underlining sentences to send to friends or writing them on Post-it notes for future inspiration. But for all its witty repartee, her debut novel is also a smart, even profound critique of sexism and misogyny — though the author almost charms us into not noticing.

“Long Island Compromise” is even more ambitious, suggesting that this writer’s talents are limitless. It begins in 1980, when a millionaire factory owner named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from the driveway of his mansion in Middle Rock (read: Great Neck, Long Island). He was about to climb into his Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and drive to work when “a man leapt from behind onto Carl’s back and hooded him in one swift, balletic move,” turning his “world black.”

At home, Carl's pregnant wife Ruth and two young children don't suspect anything is amiss until mid-afternoon, when Ruth calls Carl's office to ask if she can pick up some eggs and spaghetti on the way home. His secretary, who thought Carl had taken the day off without informing her, tells Ruth that she hasn't seen him all day. Unsure what to make of this, Ruth turns to Carl's mother Phyllis, the matriarch of the family, who immediately takes charge, and within minutes the police and FBI are on the scene.

The residents of this ultra-opulent community (among them the Fletchers, the wealthiest) are horrified that such a crime could occur within their rarefied gates. “They were speechless, they said, speechless! And yet, for all their muteness, none of them could stop talking about it.” The Fletchers had been enviable for their wealth and position, occupying prime waterfront real estate and prominent in civic and synagogue life. But being “on top” had not protected them, and Ruth reflects that perhaps it was even the opposite, that “money had fooled her” into believing she was “insulated from danger… Look what happened if she allowed herself to assume that her good fortune was guaranteed simply because it was enormous. Idiot!”

It's no spoiler to say that after five days, a ransom is paid to the kidnappers and Carl is found blindfolded, bound and handcuffed in a gas station bathroom. His trauma is a “dybbuk” that poisons the Fletchers for decades, something like “Cossacks murdering your brothers in front of you.”

The novel's omniscient and highly opinionated narrator is not identified, but he clearly believes that inherited wealth is corrosive and that the Fletcher children (Nathan, Beamer, and Jenny) prove that. The adult Beamer becomes a film screenwriter who relies on his childhood friend Charlie to do most of the work on his scripts while consuming massive amounts of whatever drugs are available and seeing a dominatrix once a week behind his wife's back. After Charlie goes freelance, Beamer's career takes a spectacular nosedive. There's no mirth in the misfortune of others here. There's no fun watching him crash and burn, even though Beamer has done everything humanly possible to ensure that outcome.

Nathan, the eldest Fletchers' son, is the polar opposite of his brother. Where Beamer is wild and lecherous, Nathan is eternally anxious and carries beta-blockers in his pockets for a heart condition he doesn't have and would be afraid to treat if he did. His wife, Alyssa, is protective of her husband's neuroses but is unaware that he is in a downward spiral, both financially and professionally. He is the most dutiful of his brothers by far, and though he wants nothing more than to please everyone around him, his tendency to see danger lurking around every corner is unsettling to everyone, especially his son, Ari, who is as high-strung as his father. There are rare, charming moments, however, when Nathan is calm enough to comfort his son and reflect, “There are few things more rewarding than seeing someone who is like you and loving them instead of hating them. That was one amazing thing about fatherhood that Nathan hadn't anticipated.”

Ironically, Jenny has become a union organizer (her father’s factory is non-union) after trying on several different identities as a Yale student. For her, not only is “wealth a paralyzing starting position,” it is also a lifelong source of shame. “What is it about shame,” Brodesser-Akner writes, “that a teaspoon of it weighs so much more than a teaspoon of happiness or any other innocuous emotion? What is it about shame that always seems like the truth?”

“Long Island Compromise” is an exploration of intergenerational trauma and an unabashed critique of income inequality (it even invokes Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class”), but it’s also uproariously funny. Ruth is not a doting mother, but she’s like a character in an early Woody Allen film, with her deadpan jokes and guilt-inducing Yiddishisms. When Jenny refuses to participate in her high school graduation ceremony because “I’m not an animal … I don’t have to act,” Ruth retorts, “Sarah Bernhardt here!” When one of her children addresses her not as Mom but as Ma, she fires back: “I’m Ma now. Like you were raised on the street. Bugsy Siegel here.”

The moment in “Long Island Compromise” that made me cry came later, when a much older Carl confronts his inability to move on from the effects of the kidnapping and contemplates forgiving himself for his role in the legacy: “Forgiveness? What would that look like? … Forgiveness for the ways he saw around him that had stopped his family’s life… He had tried so hard. He had tried just as hard as everyone else.”

I won't say whether the book's opening line is prophetic, but it hardly matters. Brodesser-Akner has written a humane, brazen, beautiful novel whose words dance exuberantly on the page.

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor, and publishing strategist. She is a former director of Oprah’s Book Club and book editor for O, The Oprah Magazine.