I recommend this book highly. If you wish to purchase it, please consider buying it from Battenkill Books, my local bookstore. (518 -677- 2515), or e-mail Connie Brooks at [email protected] or visit the store’s website. They take Paypal and ship anywhere. I will be at my station in the bookstore today (Saturday) at ll a.m. as Recommender-In-Chief. You can visit me and Red at the store, call me at the store, or e-mail me there and I will be happy to suggest some good book options to you.
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Schroder begins with a fateful lie and goes on to recount the story of Eric Schroder’s flight to Lake Champlain, Vermont with his six-year-old daughter Meadow. Eric has kidnapped Meadow in an effort to escape the authorities in the midst of an increasingly hostile custody battle with his wife. Eric, as his wife is soon to learn, is not who he says he is.
From a correctional facility outside of Albany, Eric narrates the powerful and heartbreaking course of his life. His writing is a manifesto for his identity as a father. He tells of his secret escape from Germany with his own taciturn father and his resulting unexplained separation from his mother, the escape to America, his adolescent life in Dorchester, Mass., and then, a great romance and marriage that seemed to smother itself under a weight of lies and deception. Most of all, the novel is about his doomed effort to flee with his daughter so he can spent some time with her before their separation is made permanent, codified into law.
His efforts to talk to Meadow are wrenching and Eric is as irresponsible and disconnected as he is loving and earnest. As much as he wants to be a good father, he has no idea how to do it.
There is something very appealing and heroic about Eric, damaged as he is. He is a curious mix of weakness and courage. This is a tormented version of Joseph Campbell’s hero journey. We know from the first he can’t possibly get away with it, and so does he. But his permanent separation from Meadow is just not bearable to him, and he panics as he sees the most important things in life slipping out of his grip. Dodging his vigilant father-in-law, he sets out on a desperate and quixotic flight through upstate New York and New England. The book is a roller-coaster, as good novels are. I hoped that he failed, prayed that he succeeded.
This is very powerful novel, skillfully told by Amity Gaige (published by Hachette). Eric’s voice is manic, spinning from the high of his love for his daughter to his honest, often very eloquent self-awareness.
I wanted to cry as he drove with meadow through Lake George, wishing he were like all of the other families he saw: “But why couldn’t this have been mine? This world, this world of togetherness. These towel-dried families trekking under the streetlights like migrating turtles, four or five to a room, sleeping below a ceiling fan, dreams leaping from head to head, the baby curling against his sister, the dad-suddenly awakened – lazily counting his brood, one two, three kids and a wife, the wife in the midst of some well-worn dream.”
This is great writing and it never wavers through the book.
Eric reasons that he has nothing to lose by kidnapping his daughter. The journey is a last ditch effort to get his wife to pay attention to him, to permit him to explain his life, and to keep his daughter’s love and her in his life. If he can’t, then his life really isn’t worth much to him, in jail or out. This novel is ambitious, it explores shattered romance, fatherhood, the power of history, the secrets we carry and the very nature of identity. Divorce is commonplace, divorce can be devastating. History is ubiquitous, it alters lives forever. Fatherhood is rough.
I can’t (shouldn’t) say how his wife reacted to his wrenching narrative, but I can tell you how I did: this is book that will grip your heart and shake it up and down few times. I loved it, an absolutely first rate work of fiction, story-telling and insight into the fragile human soul. I recommend it highly.
You can purchase it at Battenkill Books or your local independent bookstore.