Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich

Before Carl’s kidnapping, the only thing that residents of the fictional hamlet of Middle Rock, Long Island, had to fear was radiation from their microwave ovens. But the Fletchers hand over the ransom so readily that it is as if they’ve been expecting calamity to strike. In fact, they have been through something like this before. Carl’s father, Zelig Fletcher, fled to New York from Poland in 1942, with nothing to his name but a formula for polystyrene and the knowledge that, for Jews like him, money and family could disappear with no warning. He traumatized—or prepared—his children with a catchall phrase to describe every misfortune, from busted machinery to the Holocaust: “There’s a dybbuk in the works.” In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is an evil spirit “that either warded off or provoked unexplainable happenstance like an infestation of ants in a sugar bowl or Cossacks murdering your siblings in front of you.” Zelig pursued fortune as a protective amulet. The family needed enough money to repair the havoc a dybbuk could wreak. So what if the Styrofoam factory that he built polluted Long Island Sound? As he learned in his harrowing exit from Europe, you do what you have to do to survive.