Long Island Compromise

“Our grandmothers would often tell us that no matter how much you envy someone, if everyone threw their package of problems into the center of a room and was given a choice of anyone else’s, you would, guaranteed, pick up your own. We didn’t know if that was always true, especially when it came to the Fletchers, but perhaps now we did. Perhaps now we would truly say that we would pick our own problems over even theirs.

Or would we? It wasn’t just the puncture of crime into the community that itself kidnapped the Middle Rock imagination; it was the stench of glamour associated with it. It was the Fletchers’ wealth. Their money.”

In this passage, Brodesser-Akner raises a philosophical question about the dynamics of wealth and strife, setting thematic undertones that resonate with the entire novel. Wealth might insulate the Fletchers from issues of wealth, but it leaves them open to struggles with mental health, addiction, and identity. Brodesser-Akner challenges the notion that a life of wealth is preferable in light of those issues.

“But in recent years, since her marriage, she had begun to see all the superstitions that were her heritage as the silly burden of a poor and desperate people who had no control and no explanation of why they were constantly being chased to their death. If all those superstitions were to protect against the dangers that their poverty endowed them with, then money was the solution and it was time for them to finally relax.

But now she saw that the money had tricked her. It had made Ruth, a woman born a mere four years following the liberation of Dachau, believe she was insulated from danger.”

This passage characterizes Ruth as someone who has entered into a life of wealth through her marriage with Carl. Where Ruth previously leveraged her belief in superstition to protect herself from harm, after marrying, she relies on the security that her wealth extends—a habit that gestures toward both Wealth as a Barrier to Personal Development and The Illusory Promise of Certainty. Now that Carl has been kidnapped, she reconsiders falling back on her old beliefs to rescue her.

“Now, obviously, this isn’t a terrible ending; this was the best possible ending to a horrific story. But life wasn’t over yet, and part of what happened next had to do with the way the Fletchers believed that they had done their time—that actually it was all that they’d been through already that had blessed them to enjoy this eternal sunny day. That the safety and survival they delighted in was earned by them, a sort of hazard pay for what they had endured […]

The problem is that they didn’t stop to consider what the rest of us knew, which was that they had no right to set the conditions for safety and survival in the first place—that safety and survival might not work that way. They don’t care about you. They don’t accrue like an Israel bond. The more you bank on them as investments that feed off themselves, the more precarious and insidious their yields.”

The narrator assures the reader that the story will end in a terrible way, fulfilling the promise of the novel’s opening lines. They remain ambiguous, however, on whether the story will be horrific for the Fletchers or for the reader, inviting the possibility that the story of the Fletchers is a cautionary tale about wealth.