WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Taffy Brodesser-Akner weighs the cost of generational wealth.

- JENNIFER WILSON

The rich are always crying poverty when it comes time to pay a ransom: “Net worth and liquidity are not the same thing!” Across cinema, the moneyed and their auxiliaries question the kidnappers’ math. In the film “Fargo,” the wealthy father of Jean Lundegaard (of wood-chipper infamy) grumbles, “A million dollars is a lot of damn money.” In the action thriller “Rush Hour,” the men who kidnapped the daughter of a Chinese diplomat call to demand fifty million dollars, to which the L.A.P.D. detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) exclaims, “Fifty million dollars?! Who you think you kidnapped, Chelsea Clinton?” The real-life haggling can get just as protracted. In 1973, the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty did not agree to pay his grandson’s kidnappers until several months after the initial ransom letter, when a bloody ear turned up. Even then, Getty paid only the maximum he could claim as a tax write-off.

Not so with the Fletchers, the “extraordinarily, absurdly, kidnappably rich” family at the heart of “Long Island Compromise” (Random House), by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. When Carl Fletcher is abducted outside his estate, in 1980, his family quickly coughs up the cash; Carl’s wife, Ruth, withdraws two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the bank like she’s getting a coffee to go. (She is married to the heir to a Styrofoam fortune, after all.) She delivers a briefcase with the money to a baggage carrousel at J.F.K. Airport, and, within minutes, Carl is dropped outside a Mobil bathroom, drenched in piss, vomit, and relief.