‘Real Shiv Vibes’

Welcome back to Beach Read Book Club’s discussion of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. Today, we’re talking about the character of Jenny, mother-daughter relationships, and leftist traditions within Judaism. (If you need a refresher, you can catch up on part one here, part two here, and part three here.)

Cat Zhang: Jenny is presented as the family anomaly. She’s the dissenter. She’s the only one who’s really competent, so she’s not squandering her inheritance through idiotic means and she does have a politics. She is really compelled toward Dr. Messinger. She desires a father figure who wants to talk about society and its ills. She’s a burgeoning leftist when she’s in Middle Rock. But later on, her identity crisis is that of a cloistered upper-middle-class kid who was trained her entire life to go to Yale and then went to Yale and had a crisis, like I didn’t know how to do anything but get good grades. I feel like that’s inconsistent with the version of Jenny we were initially presented. I feel, especially given the rich history of leftist Jewish activism, she would have learned a little bit of that through Dr. Messinger and then would have gone to Yale and been reading Vivian Gornick or something like that. So then later on when she’s just like, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what it means to be a scab — totally not believable to me. The only character who is presented as the sane one and the competent one in the family is the one who ends up being the most immobilized. And I just felt like she deserved better.

Julie Kosin: I don’t doubt that there are people like Jenny in the world, but her psychology is rendered in a very stereotypical way.

Zach Schiffman: It feels like Taffy knows the least about Jenny’s job. Taffy clearly knows a lot about Beamer — that’s why it’s the longest section. And then maybe she does happen to know a lot about this land-use stuff and that makes it really interesting. But it really feels like she glosses over the minutiae of Jenny’s job and just sort of waves her hand at the hunger strike. I don’t think Taffy actually understands what goes into that and I don’t either — I assume people who work for our union do, but I don’t. That’s why the Jenny section felt so vague.

Jason P. Frank: The term I want to throw into the mix with Jenny, because it’s in conversation, is Jewish American Princess. It feels like the specter of the Jewish American Princess is looming so large over the Jenny section and it’s all a reaction to that. But I don’t think anyone says the word “JAP” until her boyfriend, who does it during sex with her. It seemed like a pretty clear reference to “The Time of Her Time” by Norman Mailer, which is a short story in which a Jewish girl is in a relationship with an Irish guy and she can’t orgasm. Then finally he calls her Jewish slurs in bed and she has her first orgasm and then she breaks up with him. It was published in 1959, and it’s one of the definitional pieces in defining what Jewish American Princess is. I felt like Jenny’s story was largely in conversation with the specter of that figure.

Emily Gould: Just want to say real quickly that it’s okay for me to use the J-slur because I am one. There’s this sort of faded inescapability of that “JAP” identity, as much as Jenny struggles against it, that feels very predetermined or rote or by the book, like her refusal to get a nose job, her refusal to straighten her hair — these very sort of superficial things where she tries to differentiate herself from her high-school friends. But those are still her only actual friends by the end of her section, and by the end of the book she has fulfilled her birthright, for lack of a better word. And we’re never given any clue as to whether she is happy with it or whether she has just collapsed under the weight of her predetermined fate. I had really high hopes for the Jenny section, in part because Denise is my favorite of The Corrections characters, so I thought that she would be Denise. But she just doesn’t have any of Denise’s genuine desire to individuate from her family.

Kathryn VanArendonk: There’s pacing issues in Jenny as much as anything else. What we’re talking about is the descriptions of her time rather than scenes of what is actually happening. You’re sort of skipping past stuff quickly enough that you understand this outline, but you’re never actually seated enough in any of these scenes. There are very few of them that we actually get, like the sex scene and one exhausted union scene. From a pacing standpoint, you’re just sort of flying up until this moment and then when you get to that moment, it’s immobilization. That’s really the first point that you sit down and see who she is, when she loses her ability to do anything at all. I really was not sure whether she had a moral core or whether it was just that I was never able to fully grasp it, like I couldn’t access it enough because I was skimming too quickly over the surface of her. And at some point there’s not really a meaningful distinction between those two things. Is it that she doesn’t have one or is it just that I am not given it enough? I’m honestly not sure which one the author would say is the answer to that question.

Julie: The way that she’s like, What does having all this money mean to me? Having all this money doesn’t give me anything — I never for a second felt like there was a person on this Earth who felt that way, including Jenny. The most I ever got to feeling like Jenny was a person was when she and her friends called each other Norman, and I wonder now, Jason, if that is a reference to that Mailer short story. The end of this Jenny section overlaps with Ruth’s section because obviously Ruth was pregnant with her at the time of the kidnapping and then you get into Ruth’s whole thing about wanting to have an abortion but not realizing she could and feeling like the baby was cursed — that is the closest you ever get to understanding the psychology of any of these characters as children because it’s telling you Jenny sort of sensed that Ruth didn’t want her around. Is that the leap I’m expected to be making here?

Zach: One thing about the “JAP” thing, and I apologize for hanging on this point, but that is the only reference to Jenny’s Judaism, really. It’s not really relevant and I sort of was expecting, especially when she’s trying to get people to organize, that maybe she cares about the history of Judaism within organizing. And it’s like she doesn’t and I’m not saying that was a missed opportunity, but it’s interesting that her Judaism is so divorced from her until she’s called it in sex.

Jason: You would think also at a Yale econ program there would be opportunity to contrast her with someone who is like I care about tikkun olam, which is the Hebrew term for repairing the world. That would be interesting. What would happen if Jenny encountered someone who came at their leftism from genuine Judaism? That’s an interesting question that I think as a contrasting point would be more helpful to me than some of the others.

I do want to ask about the relationship between Ruth and Jenny. Did it feel believable? Do you feel like you know these characters?

Zach: I found Ruth to be very nothing until her chapter and then I found myself very moved.

Julie: I wish we had more of Ruth. There’s no reason you can’t establish that pied a terre dream earlier on. I just wanted more Ruth altogether, including when you get to the Arthur stuff. This book could have just been about Ruth.

Kathryn: In spite of how empty and sort of calcified Ruth is as a character until the later parts, it still felt like some of the most real elements of who Jenny was for me. It felt like the parts where I most understood the things that she felt like she had to rebel against, the most texture to her need to leave. In the sense that Nathan’s hang-ups and his stakes are proportional to what is happening around him, having a mother who’s constantly talking to you about body-issue stuff felt immediately like, that is a stake I get and makes complete sense to me. That she would be like fuck this I’m gonna pretend to be a leftist until it actually happens inside my head, right? Something about that I found much easier to comprehend and I think it also makes sense when you then get to the Ruth stuff, like you were able to kind of backward reconstruct yes, this is how this person turns into that kind of mother. Also the fact that she is pregnant at the time of the kidnapping, the fact that she has these feelings about sons versus daughters, like all of this stuff you can kind of fill in the gaps and it makes more sense to me. Ruth’s relationship with Phyllis — not even wealth focused, although that’s obviously here, not even kidnapped focused, although that’s obviously here, but just a mother-in-law to daughter-in-law lineage of how we impose identities on the people who are coming after us — it was an easier groove for me to be able to be like you don’t have to tell me the whole thing, I can kind of fill in gaps here and it made Jenny make more sense.

Cat: I’m curious to know what people’s read was on the brief conversation Jenny has with Max, Ike’s son. Is the point of that just to illuminate his resentment and the fact that they don’t actually have as chummy of a relationship with Ike as they imagine?

Kathryn: It’s the thing that sort of spurs her breakdown right? She needs a thing that creates a reason for her to be like shit, I’ve been reading all of this wrong for a while and that sort of fuels all the ground falling out from under her. It just feels like somebody who’s arrived with a sledgehammer and bonks her and then leaves.

Zach: I did find it interesting though how quickly she defends her family, because she’s so hateful of her family and then in that moment she’s immediately saying the family line and it’s like oh this was in her the whole time obviously.

Emily: Real Shiv vibes.

Jason: It had been established that she’d fooled around with Max, so I do think it’s interesting in the context of her relationships to men. Obviously it was played off as if she didn’t really care about Max, but we don’t fully know the emotions of both people involved in that moment. If it was charged with something behind the class resentments, I like that there was maybe some implied sexuality that was included in there as well. That helped me in that section.