In Taffy Brodesser-Akner ’s celebrity profiles, which made her name, the word want tends to appear ten or 20 or 30 times. Ethan Hawke wants his film set to feel “like a Sunday afternoon.” Kris Jenner wants, in Costco, “to pick out the salmon with the herb butter on her own.
” Josh Brolin wants “to work, of course he wanted to work. But he also wanted to not hate himself in the morning.” The implication is that Brodesser-Akner is unusually capable of burrowing into her subjects’ minds to reveal what they earnestly, embarrassingly wish for, whether that’s a certain kind of career or a certain kind of autonomy in selecting salmon.
It’s not surprising, then, that she started writing novels. In fiction, for better or worse, any given character’s wants can be endless; so can an author’s mind-burrowing. Brodesser-Akner’s appealingly antic first book, 2019’s Fleishman Is in Trouble , was about the alternately noble and perverted longings of Toby Fleishman, a nearly divorced doctor.
Now, in her second novel, the Jewish American family saga Long Island Compromise , she has tripled down. Her main subject is the three wealthy Fletcher siblings, whose desires and fears have an even more infinite quality than Toby’s. The zaniness, judgmental eye, and intermittent bursts of sincerity you’ll find in her profiles are all here.
So are the many markers of her prose style (lists separated by “and,” rather than commas, for example, and a generous sprinkling of e.