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Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s marital drama Fleishman is in Trouble was the smart sexy hit of 2019 and four years later became an equally acclaimed Disney+ TV series. Her new novel – which nods more than once to Succession – goes one better. The story of the Fletchers (eye-wateringly rich, made their money in polystyrene) begins with the kidnapping of the family patriarch. He’s returned, horribly damaged, five days later. Four decades on, his three obscenely spoiled and screwed-up offspring are doing their best to rip through the family wealth as fast as possible, each blighted as much by inherited trauma (which takes many forms) as by the burden of inherited wealth itself. Brodesser-Akner resists the temptation to redeem her outrageous characters: rather it’s their inability to redeem themselves that becomes the novel’s central subject. Horribly compulsive.
