‘Mandy Patinkin — Icon, Legend’

Kathryn VanArendonk: One of the Beamer things I really did enjoy is every time the narrator’s like, “Beamer can’t understand why nobody likes these shows anymore, Beamer’s completely baffled about how the world has changed.” I found that more cutting and funny than the stuff like, “Beamer really needs somebody to step on his balls. He just needs it so bad.”

Does this narrator love these people or does this narrator hate these people? And am I supposed to be with the narrator or not with the narrator in either one of those configurations? How much of what we’re watching is supposed to evoke deep pity for this person? Which is so uncomfortable to spend that much time in. How much of that am I supposed to be questioning?

I spent a lot of time wondering about the depiction of Beamer’s wife who is clueless and unthinking in her own way and yet every time she calls him to be like “where the fuck are you?” I’m like, “yes, where the fuck are you? Get it together.” So I kept ping-ponging between these extremes about how I was supposed to be reacting to this whole conceit.

Julie Kosin: This was a Fleishman retread. Beamer is the same character, a man exploring early middle-aged sexuality pasted onto Hollywood with a ton of wealth porn on top of it. This time he has a wife though.

Jason P. Frank: I just finished Larry Kramer’s Faggots, which is this very stylistic tour through sex and drugs in gay 1970s New York. And that desensitized me to shock. Reading this without the capability of feeling shock, there’s so little in the BDSM sections that works to me. It’s painfully obvious when he imagines the kidnapper coming in — the fact that he literally names the kidnapper and it is the kidnapper of his father and that’s what gets him off. And the fact that he always writes kidnapping plots. Leave something for us to piece together about this man because if you’ve done all the work then all we do is sit in pity. There was no pathology that was left unexplained.

Kathryn: The fact that he always writes kidnapping plots, it was too on the nose except for his own inability to understand why he always writes kidnapping plots — I found that very funny.

Emily Gould: I thought it would have been more interesting for Beamer to be a secretly at least somewhat talented screenwriter who has this pathology that’s blocking him from achieving his true potential. To me, it makes it boring that this character is just a collation of flaws. Absolutely no redeeming characteristics except for maybe his desire to be a good parent. The section is animated by the challenge that he’s going to fail, which is literally to show up for his angelic daughter’s music recital. You know that he’s going to spiral and take too many drugs and stop at too many fast food restaurants and end up on Mandy Patinkin’s front lawn instead of doing that. I wanted him to have a kernel of hope that someday he could succeed as a screenwriter without Charlie or that he could not disappoint his wife at any point in their relationship. There has to be some glimpse at a potential for redemption, even if that potential is then quashed. He was created by the author in order to be tortured, basically, and even though he in the most cliche way gets off on that, it’s still a fucked-up thing to do to a character because it is ultimately boring, even if you’re reading it to see exactly the path that he’s going to take to the destination of fucking it all up.

Kathryn: I wanted his flute daughter to be a twerp.

Julie: Reading all the sex stuff, I was like, “What am I supposed to be taking away from this?” What I thought was a lot more interesting was his pathology around food — that’s never really explained.

Jason: I think it’s supposed to be consumption generally for him. He is someone who consumes, who is addicted to wealth and to food and to sex. He has no self-control.

Julie: The In-N-Out thing was just that I Think You Should Leave meme.

Zach Schiffman: Because Beamer is so unenjoyable and so stressful, it made me like the Nathan section more because Nathan’s conflicts are all in minutia, in little things that cascade, whereas the Beamer stuff is so huge. It’s also so TV. I found Nathan’s section to be the best part of the book. I wondered whether I would have enjoyed the rest of the book so much if Beamer hadn’t come first.

Kathryn: The other issue with Beamer’s story coming first and being the one that is as overwhelming and testing of the reader’s ability to hang: The second the Beamer thing ends and you start in with another sibling, you’re like, my God, we have to do it again? We’ve collapsed on Mandy Patinkin’s lawn. We should probably talk about what he’s doing in this book.

Emily: Well can we get Mandy Patinkin? I mean …

Kathryn: I actually think there are ways that this book would present challenges from a TV-adaptation perspective. From a scene-by-scene basis, you can see it, absolutely. But the sibling structure — I don’t think you could do it that way. But that moment when he ends up on Mandy Patinkin’s lawn, I was like, ok, that’s the episode-three cliffhanger. It’s so felt.

Jason: On a comedy level — because I do think this is supposed to be the funniest section in a lot of ways — a lot of the jokes felt visual to me, specifically the note on the door of the dominatrix that he has to leave. I can imagine a quick cut where you watch him leave a note on the door and you have to do the work of understanding that he can’t contact the dominatrix — that is funny.

The Beamer section also involves Phyllis’s death, the funeral, and a flashback to Carl getting obsessed with The Secret Garden musical.

Jason: “Lily’s Eyes” is really a beautiful song. That’s the one that Carl sings in his room at one point. Beautiful, beautiful song. It’s a duet between two brothers, Mandy Patinkin takes the high part.

Cat Zhang: Can I use this opportunity to admit that I don’t know that much about Mandy Patinkin and need an explainer?

Jason: Mandy Patinkin — icon, legend. Very famous among non-Jewish people for The Princess Bride. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.” He’s known for musical theater. He was in some Sondheim shows, he played George in Sunny in the Park With George.

Kathryn: He had a breakout in Yentl in 1983, which is a Jewish text that he was strongly associated with. That movie was big. He was famously unpleasant to work with early in his career and then later has transitioned into this cuddly grandpa. He’s probably grouchy but he loves you and he’s deeply feely and his marriage has softened him and his kids take TikToks of him.

Emily: I would say best known for Homeland. It was such a long-running show and his character is so quintessentially similar to probably who he actually is in real life: the extremely Jewish pater-familias character who guides poor mentally ill spy Claire Danes through her job and is her surrogate father figure.

Jason: Kathryn, I’m curious what you thought in this section would be difficult to adapt?

Kathryn: So much of the tension of what we’re seeing is: What is happening in Beamer’s head and what is not happening in Beamer’s head? We, the outside observers are given enough awareness that his phone is ringing and he is ignoring it. How would you go about depicting that without voice-over? What does it actually look like if these characters need to have dialogue with each other in order to explain some of what is happening inside their heads? Beamer is built on this “nobody can know the thing that I am anxious about inside” and we are given that access to him because of the narrator. But in a TV show he would need to be constantly articulating that to somebody else and in doing that would be voicing all of the shame that he’s supposedly incapable of voicing.

Emily: Has anyone else ever seen the unaired HBO pilot for the Noah Baumbach adaptation of The Corrections? I think one of the reasons why that pilot flopped is that it follows the structure of the book more and focuses exclusively on Chip. What it actually should have done is introduced all of the siblings in the pilot. I really wish that they had been given that note and then been allowed to continue to make that TV show.

Jason: I’m curious what people thought about the scene with the medium. I think Beamer wants access to spirituality and can’t let himself get there through Judaism so he tries to find a new manner of doing it through this fortune teller leading him into a manic episode. The fact that her name was Phyllis felt one level too obvious to me. There was no space between the reader and the text that the reader could fill.

Kathryn: The medium was very, how do we make this feel like Los Angeles?

Julie: I would have loved a little passage of that section from Noelle’s perspective. Not that this book needs to be longer but the outsiders — the people who are not members of the Fletcher family, but who are in it with them — could have added some interesting texture.

Zach: That is true. There’s that whole section where Beamer knew he was creepy and knew he had money, but Noelle wanted that. But she clearly likes him and it’s never understood why. That would have been a way for us to like Beamer.

Jason: We are constantly told how charming he is and never see it.

Zach: Jenny is the way we find out that Beamer is charming and even then it’s not that much.

Emily: Their whole relationship is something else that is given to us as fact that we have to take on faith because we don’t see it. When we were initially introduced to them as characters, they’re estranged from each other and we’re told that they were really close before that, but we don’t see them bonding in their childhood.

Would you rather watch the Santiago trilogy or Family Business and why?

Julie: What channel does Family Business air on Kathryn?

Kathryn: It’s clearly an HBO show, right? It’s a Sunday-night HBO show.

Julie: It obviously is just Succession but something about it felt less HBO to me.
Kathryn: It’s not Succession. It’s Sopranos. It’s sort of between.

Emily: I love a good dumb action movie that makes no sense. I would totally watch the Santiago trilogy.

Kathryn: Particularly if it starts to take fascinating weird turns by the end where the character is going in all kinds of different places. It does feel like the Santiago trilogy, you know exactly what it is and that it will supply the thing that the book says it will. And Family Business could be great or it could suck and I’m honestly not sure which one it is. So much of it depends on the execution which then pulls you back into all of your feelings about this book and I can’t escape the loop of what I would want that show to be and what you would need to do to make it pleasurable and how much of it would be it telling me that it’s good.

Julie: I feel like your review of it would be that this is a multicam sitcom masquerading as prestige.

Kathryn: I would be fascinated to watch it!

Jason: I want the Daily Beast exposé on the fact that this TV show is actually based on his former writing partner’s family.

Kathryn: Yes! That’s the really entertaining little nugget where it’s like, gasp!

Cat: The Cut could run Beamer’s sex diary.

Zach: One thing we never discussed is the diversity woman, Anya. I don’t know who she was trying to make that joke for. She was trying to make a joke both for boomers and for super woke people and it didn’t work either way. I was like, this could have been funny, but you didn’t know who the audience was.

Jason: I like something that the writer does there with Beamer where he doesn’t know how he’s coming across and she doesn’t over-explain that he’s coming off as aggressive and you only see it in their reactions. I think that that was a nice bit of writing.

Julie: I want to know how a parent would react if somebody gave your child Are You Sure You’ve Thought This Through?

Emily: I would throw it away immediately. Seems like child abuse. That was legitimately funny that the author’s child died though. That’s hilarious.

Casting the Fletchers

Apple TV+ has already optioned Long Island Compromise for a series adaptation, and we have some thoughts about who they should hire. 

Emily: If they can’t get Mandy Patinkin, they should strongly consider F. Murray Abraham if he’s available.

Julie: Patinkin should play Carl and then F. Murray Abraham can play the Patinkin role.

Emily: What about for the siblings?

Zach: Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin?

Julie: No, you can’t use Succession or Arrested Development.

Zach: Then let’s do Gaby Hoffman in a genderqueer role, and then we’ll do whoever played the older sister on Transparent and then we’ll do the other Duplass brother.

Emily: Mark Duplass is Beamer, no argument there.

Zach: No, Mark Duplass as Nathan.

Jason: I guess he’s too old, but I wanted a Matthew Broderick in there somewhere. No?

Emily: He’s too much of a goy.

Zach: It’d be fun to do all goy: Rachel Sennott, Bradley Cooper, Rachel Brosnahan.

Emily: My God, the ADL is coming for that production.

Julie: Mark Duplass could be Beamer and Jay could be Nathan.

Cat: Jesse Eisenberg is crying in his room.

Emily: Perfect. Double Duplass. Just have to point out that they’re not Jewish, but we all know that already.

Jason: Then if they’re really sticking to it, they should get Dianna Agron, an actually Jewish woman, to play Noelle.

Zach: She’s perfect for this. She should play young Ruth because I always say Dianna Agron has the best nose job in Hollywood.

Beach Read Book Club is moderated by Jasmine Vojdani. Remember to check your welcome email for an exclusive discount code from our friends at Bookshop.org. Send us your burning theories, questions, and rants at beachreadbookclub@nymag.com. We’ll be back next Wednesday with our discussion of the Nathan section (pgs 165–252).