Long Island Compromise

In the early 18th century, Duty Williamson arrived on Long Island with her husband and coveted its occupied lands. The implacable Duty went from estate to estate on the territory to assert her divine right to own the land. To satisfy her, one of the townspeople offered to rename its peninsula Duty’s Spit in her honor. Duty’s Spit became Duty’s Head and then Middle Rock.

Zelig Fletcher had bought his Middle Rock estate from the descendant of an original landowner. Zelig was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who had hidden from the Nazis in a university basement for several weeks. Zelig sheltered another young man named Chaim, who appeared to be dying of an unspecified illness. Chaim shared the formula for a special polymer that he planned to sell in the United States with Zelig. After Chaim died, Zelig boarded the ship that Chaim was supposed to take to escape Europe.

In New York, Zelig started working at a factory, where he convinced the owner to produce the polymer from Chaim’s formula. The factory owner promoted Zelig to foreman, enabling him to buy the factory in a few years. Zelig used his wealth to relocate his operations to Queens. His foreman, Lazer, would have a son named Ike. Zelig then became enamored with Middle Rock and chose to purchase a new home there. He married Phyllis after meeting her when she helped him park his car outside a singles dance. They soon had a daughter, whom they named Marjorie, and a son, whom they named Chaim, or “Carl.”

Middle Rock became a prominent Jewish American community. Carl assumed control of the factory when Zelig suddenly died. He married Ruth and had three children, the last of whom would be born after the family mythology had been cemented by Carl’s kidnapping.

Jenny becomes obsessed with a videogame called Mogul, which Ari introduces to her. In the game, Jenny plays a character who rises up the ranks in his chosen industry. There is no endpoint to the game apart from death, though the player collects more points the longer they stay alive. The game rewards players for performing work tasks according to capitalist expectations and disproportionately docks points for minor infractions like failing to answer an email in time. The game becomes a way for Jenny to ignore her family, with whom her relationship is at an all-time low. The narrator indicates that Jenny will eventually die by suicide.

The novel flashes back. Against her mother’s wishes, Jenny chooses to leave Middle Rock the night she graduates from high school. Jenny pursues a summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Prague, during which her mother remains passive aggressive toward her and berates her for choosing to break up with her high school boyfriend, Brett Schloff. Brett had been satisfied with his life at Middle Rock, which conflicted with Jenny’s curiosity about the world outside their hometown.

After her internship, Jenny studies economics and art history at Brown to spite her family, having been influenced by the father of her friends Sarah and Charlie Messinger, Dr. Richard Messinger. Richard is not as affluent as his neighbors but frequently uses his position to critique the upper classes. Jenny had observed Richard’s critique in her own family and looked to him as a surrogate for her own distant father. Ironically, Jenny’s college choices please Ruth and Phyllis, who see her studies as a pipeline to academia. Jenny becomes listless about her future, unsure about how she can make sense of her identity outside of her wealth. She also fails to connect with her peers, increasing her alienation.

Jenny switches concentrations several times, prompting a career development officer at Brown to encourage her to finish her studies in art history. When Jenny argues that the concentration seems futile and thus unethical, the officer challenges her to change the world within her chosen expertise. Jenny takes her advice but follows her instinct to proceed to graduate school.

At Yale, she studies economics but remains unsure of how to use her degree. During her third year of studies, she begins working as a teacher’s assistant. While grading papers, she is called out by a classmate named Alice, who informs her that the graduate school union is currently on strike to bargain for higher health insurance benefits. Jenny is ashamed to have unknowingly subverted the union and hides in her apartment for a week, overwhelmed as the shame expands to her resentment for Middle Rock. At the end of the week, Beamer visits her out of concern that she hasn’t returned any of his messages.

Beamer looks after Jenny, prompting Jenny to confess her dilemma to him. Beamer encourages her to participate in her union’s activities even after Jenny points out that the union leaders are “rich kids who have no place to put their energy” and who “think that this is real life” (287). Alice calls to praise Jenny for leaving her class without an assistant for a week. She invites Jenny to join their meeting the following night. Beamer comments that this is a “fresh start” for Jenny. Before he leaves, he tells her that he is planning to marry his girlfriend, Noelle. Jenny attends the meeting and is introduced to an older union figure named Andrew. Andrew leads the union in applauding Jenny. The union’s action successfully results in better insurance.

Jenny becomes deeply involved in union activity, though she remains torn by her ambitions to effect change outside of academia. She is consoled, however, by her union friends’ commitment to their beliefs and becomes increasingly radicalized. Jenny realizes that her wealth does not matter to her union friends, which cements her commitment to their cause.

Jenny becomes attracted to Andrew, who has remained with the union despite dropping out several years earlier. They enter a vague romantic relationship before Jenny goes home to Middle Rock for the summer. Jenny asks Ike for a summer job at the factory. She pitches the idea of organizing a union to Ike and Max. Jenny and Max have a few sexual encounters. Jenny becomes disappointed in the company of her Middle Rock friends, who have committed themselves to domestic lives. Ruth informs Jenny that her ex-boyfriend, Brett, is getting married to an optometrist also named Jenny. Jenny thinks about her past relationship with Brett and how he seemed excited by her intelligence even if he was too sincere for her liking. To weaken her nostalgia for home, Jenny recalls the day of Nathan’s bar mitzvah, when she caught her naked father experiencing a depressive episode in the bathroom.

Before Jenny returns to New Haven for the start of the semester, she and Ruth attend the funeral of family friend Glenn Finkelstein, who died in a prison transfer accident while serving a sentence for fraud. Glenn had been convicted after trying to boost his meager income by selling duplicate cemetery plots to multiple people. His criminal activity did not start out of an intention to defraud people but to support his daughter Amy’s prodigious talent for playing cello. The Finkelsteins used what was left of their finances to pay for Glenn’s defense and then moved out of Middle Rock immediately after his conviction.

Jenny doesn’t understand why the Finkelsteins left Middle Rock, prompting Ruth to comment that she cannot understand because she is a “rich girl.” Ruth cannot relate to this because she was not born rich and thus always feels like her wealth is at risk. When Jenny wishes she didn’t have her wealth, Ruth reminds her daughter that Glenn was only trying to give Amy the same head start that Jenny has had all her life. At the shiva, Glenn’s brothers share fond memories of the illicit activities they’d done together.

Jenny learns that Andrew is polyamorous. Andrew is soon fired from the union after having sex with a freshman student. Jenny remains with him, nonetheless. She takes him to Middle Rock as her date to her friend Erica Mayer’s wedding. Andrew is shocked by the revelation of Jenny’s immense wealth, which he uses to degrade her during sex. Andrew accuses her of keeping her wealth a secret, which makes her involvement in the union insincere. Jenny breaks up with him soon afterward. Andrew goes to work for a family hedge fund.

Jenny starts donating her quarterly stock payouts to various unions. Several years later, Jenny feels insulted when Beamer insinuates that she has never left school. Jenny goes through Beamer’s work bag and finds 25 containers of drugs. Beamer catches her finding his stash, and Jenny becomes concerned that he has a problem that he has never disclosed to her.

Ruth invites Jenny to visit Phyllis as she is dying. Carl is considering writing a memoir, but Ruth discourages this. During dinner, Beamer quips about the “Long Island Compromise,” which Carl thinks will be a great title for his memoir. Later, while Beamer and Jenny talk about Family Business, Jenny points out that the show is clearly based on their family. Jenny opens up about her resentments with Ruth. Beamer points out that Jenny seems generally unhappy, and he argues that she has organized her life to spite Ruth rather than to align with her own values. Jenny tries to argue that the work she does is meaningful, but Beamer reiterates that most of the people she helps at Yale are already rich. Because she has proven her success in resisting their family values, Beamer encourages Jenny to move on with her life. An incensed Jenny refuses to talk to him any further and decides to stay in her family’s brownstone.

At Phyllis’s shiva, Jenny reunites with her childhood friends and becomes prone to nostalgia. Richard praises Jenny’s efforts at work and then shares that he has become a full-time painter after retiring from academia. Jenny learns from Erica that Brett is getting a divorce from his wife after his wife had an affair with another woman. Jenny becomes upset that she didn’t learn about it from Ruth. Ruth argues that she didn’t know if Jenny would have cared given her “bohemian” values. Jenny is outraged by her comment.

Once again filled with shame, Jenny hides out in the brownstone instead of returning to New Haven. Several months pass, and she loses her job at the union. Jenny recognizes that she is in a state of depression, which she refers to “semantic evacuation,” borrowing a term from one of her classes. She loses sight of the meaning of her work and distracts herself by playing Mogul. In the game, she chooses to play according to her personal values, causing her avatar to lose his job. She loses a million points when her character performs a striptease to plead for his job.

Jenny notices that her bank account balance is lower than usual. She starts reaching out to her family to investigate the problem and soon realizes that her money is gone. She feels content to know that the curse of her wealth is being lifted.

Nathan calls Jenny to discuss the likelihood of the factory closing down before the family can sell it. Jenny tries to reassure him that this could be good for them, but Nathan is too alarmed by the liability to agree with her. Feeling uneasy about the factory, Jenny decides to visit it. Ike talks about the plans to finish their last few job orders before the closure. He is concerned for Max, to whom he hoped to pass on control of the factory, though Ike remains grateful for everything the Fletchers have done for him. He opens up about the mental health of his wife, Mindy, who has long resented their lot in life. Phyllis had helped raise Max while Ike brought Mindy to a psychiatric hospital. Jenny argues that her family was trying to preserve Ike’s value to them, but Ike disagrees, suggesting that Phyllis’s empathy for him stemmed from her experience with Carl after his kidnapping.

Ike calls Max over to say hi to Jenny and then suggests that they should have lunch. Max reluctantly agrees. At lunch, Max opens up about his father’s fears for the future. He resents the Fletchers for reneging on their promise to give Ike the factory, and he claims that Ike has been treated like a valued employee but not like family. He criticizes Jenny for not working for her living. Max then discusses Carl’s trauma, which Jenny downplays, saying that he has only suffered for a week in his life. Max disagrees, having seen the impact of his trauma at work. He tries to point out that each of the children have inherited Carl’s trauma in various ways, but Jenny thinks that Carl is too well-off to hold on to his trauma. She criticizes Max’s assessment, which offends him because she is condescending about his class status.

Max reveals that he did research on Carl’s kidnapping for a class and theorized that someone else had been involved in the kidnapping apart from the Abraham brothers. The district attorney had attempted to learn the mastermind’s identity, but he was stopped by Phyllis. Max raises the possibility that Arthur could have been involved because he didn’t come from money. Jenny is upset by Max’s insinuations and leaves.

On her way to the brownstone, Jenny pulls up Mogul and sees that her avatar is unemployed and unhoused. She soon realizes that her Uber has taken her not to the brownstone but to her parents’ house in Middle Rock. She changes the address to reach the train station and continues playing. Her avatar dies in the cold before he is able to make sense of his life. Jenny cries out and is told off by a woman who tells her that “[t]here are real problems out there” (343). Upset and listless, Jenny takes the train and feels herself merging with her avatar in a video game world. She reaches the brownstone and finds her mother inside.