Polystyrene magnate Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from the driveway of his Middle Rock, Long Island estate one morning in 1980. After a very tense week in captivity, he is returned upon the payment of $250,000 ransom, but he is much the worse for wear. Nervous and panicky in the aftermath of his ordeal, Carl retreats from the world and is never the same man again. The kidnapping also severely impacts his wife Ruth, and their three children, Bernard (nicknamed Beamer), Nathan, and third sibling Jenny, who was born shortly after the kidnapping but is still impacted from the way it lingers over the Fletcher family.
Beamer is a hacky Hollywood screenwriter whose drug habit and predilection for kinky sex have his marriage and career teetering on the brink. His behavior has become erratic since the dissolution of his writing partnership with his friend Charlie, who has seemingly turned Beamer’s family story into a cheesy hit sitcom. Nathan is a land-use attorney whose career has stalled out because of his inability to deal with clients. He’s a hypochondriac obsessed with the idea that disaster is lurking around every corner, laying in wait for him and his family. He can’t bring himself to admit to his wife what a precarious financial position they are in, even as she spends down their savings on a home renovation and a dual bar mitzvah for their twin sons. Jenny is a labor organizer ashamed of her family’s wealth and privilege to a neurotic degree, unable to connect with other people due to her worry that they will discover the extent of her family’s fortune.
The novel is structured somewhat oddly. After the initial opening chapter on the kidnapping, Brodesser-Akner takes each of Carl’s children in turn, writing mini biographies of each up to and past the death of their grandmother, which event leads them all back to their Middle Rock estate. It’s a real debate which Fletcher sibling is the least likeable. They are all incredibly selfish and self-defeating, constantly making irredeemably bad decisions and digging themselves deeper into self-dug holes. While this is clearly an intentional choice on the part of the author, it is also true that they are all far too extreme to be recognizably human, much less relatable to the reader. It’s a real drag to read these middle chapters and constantly have their idiocy rubbed in your face by an author who seemingly just wants to revel in their bad decision-making, whether or not it’s consistent with the rest of their character.
In addition to their wealth, the Fletcher family’s Jewishness is a central theme of the novel. The story of their wealth is wrapped up in the Holocaust, with Carl’s father Zelig escaping Poland on a lucky break and working hard to eventually start the business which Carl inherited. Ruth’s fierce adherence to the family’s faith clashes with both of her sons, one of whom marries outside the religion and the other of whom marries an even more observant practitioner. Ruth is the novel’s most problematic character. She is portrayed in a very stereotypical Jewish mother way, hectoring and hysterical, recriminatory and impossible to reason with or contradict. She’s not the only Jewish stereotype. Nathan is a stock nebbish with his constant worry over blood pressure and heart attacks,
I suppose the defense lies in the fact that Brodesser-Akner is herself Jewish and therefore writing from experience. But the portrayal of the Fletchers was often very uncomfortable to read, and that feeling only deepened after several revelations in the novel’s final pages.