John Self in The Guardian:
Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” opens Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, irresistibly. Sure we do! She is, after all, the laureate of upended lives, as her smash-hit 2019 debut Fleishman Is in Trouble showed.
There follows a 30-page account – inspired by real events but twisted into fictional counterparts – of the abduction in 1980 of the “kidnappably rich” Carl Fletcher, patriarch of one of the wealthiest families on Long Island. (The family’s money comes from a packaging factory they own in the prosperous town of Middle Rock.) A kidnapping is a story that comes with inbuilt tension (“We have your Zionist scum husband”) and colour, as the locals are rendered “speechless” by the news – though “none of them could stop talking about it”.
Carl survives his ordeal, so where’s the terrible ending? Like revenge, some things are best served cold, and the bulk of this chunky book goes down a generation to the children of Carl and his wife, Ruth.
More here.