Schroder: A Novel

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…transporting…the reader is left to dissect a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

The entire book is a testimony, written in prison, by a divorced dad to his ex-wife. Equal parts plea, apology and defense, this enthralling letter rises up from a fog of narcissism that will cloud your vision and put you under his spell…Gaige displays an unnerving insight into the grandiosity and fragility of the middle-aged male ego…With its psychological acuity, emotional complexity and topical subject matter, [Schroder] deserves all the success it can find.

Publishers Weekly

Gaige (The Folded World) revisits the fragility of family life in her newest, based broadly on the Clark Rockefeller child custody kidnapping case. The book—written as an apology (in both the Socratic and emotional sense) to the narrator’s ex-wife as he awaits trial—is quiet and deeply introspective. Erik Schroder was born in East Berlin, but escaped with his father to working-class Boston. Recreating himself as Eric Kennedy, raised in a fictional town by a patrician family, the narrator distances himself from his past to gain entrée into American aristocracy. But his marriage—based on lies—goes sour, and in the midst of the resultant unfavorable custody arrangement, Eric takes his six-year-old daughter, Meadow, on an unsanctioned road trip through New England, seizing the opportunity to reconnect with her, even as he realizes that this idyllic time is as illusory as his past. Although Eric is often unreliable, Gaige conjures a groundswell of sympathy for an otherwise repugnant character. Tender moments of observation, regret, and joy—all conveyed in unself-consciously lyrical prose—result in a radiant meditation on identity, memory, and familial love and loss. Agent: Wendy Weil, the Wendy Weil Agency. (Feb.)

Booklist

"Gaige creates a fascinating and complex character in Erik, as he moves from the eccentric and slightly irresponsible father to a desperate man at the end of his rope . . . [an] expert exploration of the immigrant experience, alienation, and the unbreakable bond between parent and child."

Chicago Tribune

"Impossible to put down....Gaige completely creates this alternative universe, and it is entirely suspenseful as readers are drawn to the Schroder/Kennedy character. It's a credit to Gaige's talents that she can create such a morally complex character."

New York Times Book Review

"The essence of the ersatz Rockefeller/Kennedy character is of course an epic, pathological narcissism, and this Gaige gets impressively right....Gaige writes beautifully....The novel's climactic chapter is also its best conceived: the item that brings about Schroder's downfall is perfect, both dramatic and mundane. The reader will realize that he or she has been given every detail necessary to see what was coming, yet didn't, which is plot-making of the highest order."

Entertainment Weekly on The Folded World

"The bitterness and disillusion of marriage have been thoroughly plumbed in contemporary fiction; Gaige is one of the rare novelists who is more interested in its potential for happiness and grace. A-."

Los Angeles Times

"Utterly devourable...gently, and beautifully unfolds, like a gauzy curtain in an open window."

Chicago Tribune (Favorite Books of 2007)

"The Folded World will appeal to readers who like to dive into the muck of internal and interpersonal conflicts, and break the surface with breath born of insight and empathy. Amity Gaige's second novel lives up to the reputation she earned with her first one, as an original, compelling voice."

Good Housekeeping

"Gaige's spot-on prose makes this quirky parental drama irresistible."

Reader's Digest

"Strikingly original."

The Washington Post

"Enthralling.... Gaige displays an unnerving insight into the grandiosity and fragility of the middle-aged male ego.... SCHRODER is clearly her breakout book. With its psychological acuity, emotional complexity and topical subject matter, it deserves all the success it can find. I wish there were such a thing as a Divorced Couples Book Club just so we could listen in on the tangled responses."

4 stars People

"Like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Schroder is charming and deceptive, likable and flawed, a conman who has a clever way with words. Schroder's tale is deeply engaging, and Gaige's writing is surprising and original, but the real pull of this magnetic novel is the moral ambiguity the reader feels."

Meghan O'Rourke

"Daring...a clean, suspenseful, economical story that is also a clever act of social commentary...As a case study of the unreliable narrator, SCHRODER is beautifully managed...Gaige...is an accomplished writer, and the novel elegantly navigates its ethical razor's edge, brining the reader along on a kind of joyride gone wrong...half sympathy-inducing mea culpa, half a bristling act of bravado and self-ignorance...Novelists like Gaige remind us that we live not in the age of the nineteenth-century marriage plot but in the era of the twenty-first century divorce plot...Gaige writes with a cool strangeness, a strong sense of style...Schroder is by turns dry, peculiar, expansive, and visionary."

Janet Maslin

"Agile. . . transporting . . . a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers."

The Oprah Magazine O

"A lyrical and poetic novel about the adverse ramifications of a little white lie that follows its teller throughout his life."

Kathryn Schulz

"It's a mark of how good SCHRODER is that, upon finishing it, I immediately went out and read the rest of her work."

The Los Angeles Times

"...a fascinating psychological portrait of love, longing and self-loathing....Written as a jailhouse confession to his ex-wife, SCHRODER's closest literary relative is probably Lolita (minus the pedophilia): The compellingly unreliable narrator of European background, the East Coast road trip with the precocious child, the narcissism, the unsavory motels, the whiff of danger. SCHRODER easily stands up to the comparison....And yet the book, at its heart, is a love story. Schroder may be deluded-and a woefully irresponsible parent-but his touching, sincere adoration of his daughter and ex-wife is his great redemption."

Jonathan Franzen

"The measure of Gaige's great gifts as a storyteller is that she persuades you to believe in a situation that shouldn't be believable, and to love a narrator who shouldn't be lovable. Seldom has such a daring concept for a novel been grounded in such an appealing character."

Jennifer Egan

"In SCHRODER, Amity Gaige explores the rich, murky realm where parental devotion edges into mania, and logic crabwalks into crime. This offbeat, exquisitely written novel showcases a fresh, forceful young voice in American letters."

David Bezmozgis

"Amity Gaige has written a flawless book. It does not contain a single false note. Playful and inventive, SCHRODER movingly depicts the ways we confound our own hearts--how even with the best intentions, we fail to love those closest to us as well as we wish we could. Eric Schroder should take his place among the most charismatic and memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Amity Gaige her place among the most talented and impressive writers working today."

Adam Haslett

"You will not want to put this book down. You will want to read it in one big gulp. This is a bullet of a novel, aimed at our pieties about parenthood and familial love. You won't soon forget Schroder or his daughter or the sentences that bring them to life. To those who know Gaige's first two novels, it's no surprise she's produced another stunner. To those who don't, you're in for a treat."

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

"Terrific.... SCHRODER grabs you early on, holds you with its lyrical prose and surprising insights and lingers in the mind long afterward."

Book Reporter

"SCHRODER is a beautifully told story about how a father's undeniable love for his young child can be distorted by the pressure he experiences at the thought of being cut off from her.... we all are destined to fall short of our expectations, to fail to match our lovingly painted self-portraits, some of us more dramatically and tragically than others. It's but one of many penetrating insights that transport Amity Gaige's novel from the realm of mere artifice to the status of real art."

USA Today

"With Schroder, Gaige has achieved a remarkable feat. How impressive to have created a protagonist who's brilliant, narcissistic, creepy and unhinged, yet somehow sympathetic...Gaige is such a masterful writer that she makes Schroder seem more pitiful than hateful...As unlikely as it sounds, you'll be half-rooting for this lost soul to prevail."

Wisconsin State Journal

"With SCHRODER Gaige has created a narrator who, while flawed and frustrating, is intensely lovable....SCHRODER is a touching story of parental alienation."

The Missourian

"Prepare to be captivated by SCHRODER, a riveting novel by Amity Gaige with a unique and incredibly creative voice...SCHRODER is a book to be digested slowly, reread and discussed. It's quite a wild ride, but the miles fly by with Amity Gaige at the wheel."

The Economist

"Eric is the unlikeliest of characters to charm a reader. His life is a tabloid drama: man abducts daughter, gets arrested and confesses in a letter to his estranged wife. It is to the credit of Amity Gaige, an American writer, that her third novel, SCHRODER, transforms this thriller plot into a deeply moving tale....What distinguishes SCHRODER is its insight and language....Ms. Gaige excels at landscapes; her writing has the still, clear beauty of a mountain lake."

San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] superb novel....Gaige makes fraudulent, kidnapping Eric utterly sympathetic-heartbreakingly so-which is part of this book's intelligence and depth. We have so little distance from him that we become myopic in our desire to have his outrageous escapade work, even though we know it cannot."

The Denver Post

"It's a fine line, sometimes, between disturbing and enrapturing. Amity Gaige's new novel, SCHRODER, treads that thrilling line-swiftly, and on tiptoe-for 270 pages. It is impossible to put down....Despite his criminal behavior, our intimacy with Eric makes his behavior, and this story, more tragic than enraging. Does he love his daughter? We know that he thinks he does. But does carting her across state lines-in a stolen car, no less-constitute love? Who's to say? SCHRODER certainly doesn't give us an easy answer. But it digs deeply, satisfyingly, disturbingly into the question....she's created a riveting tale, at once infuriating, heartbreaking and human."

Artvoice

"To say that the piece of fiction Gaige has produced is successful is a serious understatement.... Schroder is refreshingly bereft of the formal wizardry that characterizes much of the postmodern fiction that attracted academic interest in the second half of the twentieth century. This is good and this is nice. Instead, Gaige turns to the ineluctable parts of life that go by big-sounding names: love and fear, for instance....Not to mention the fact that this book is great fun to read. It is relentlessly compelling in the way that mystery stories can sometimes be."

Barnes & Noble Review

"Amity Gaige's SCHRODER is a triumph of voice. Part road trip escapade, part liar's lament, this absorbing, expertly crafted book takes the form of a self-serving but moving apologia written in an Albany jail cell by an untrustworthy but genuinely heartbroken father and ex-husband with astonishingly bad judgment....one heartrending lesson from all these narratives is that even a deeply flawed parent can be a loving one."

Buffalo News

"Fascinating....In all, we are glad to be along for the ride. And when someone asks Schroder, near the novel's end, 'Do you miss it? I mean, your made-up life?'-we can assume that, in large part, he does. We can also confess, now we know Schroder so well, that we do too."

People

"Like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Schroder is charming and deceptive, likable and flawed, a conman who has a clever way with words. Schroder's tale is deeply engaging, and Gaige's writing is surprising and original, but the real pull of this magnetic novel is the moral ambiguity the reader feels.

The Wall Street Journal

"On occasion... a novel will provoke a host of tangled and disconcertingly conflicted reactions-revulsion and affection; blame and understanding; a connection that goes beyond surface sympathy to a deeper, and possibly unwanted, emotional recognition. These were among the things I experienced while reading Amity Gaige's astoundingly good novel SCHRODER."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Brilliantly written….What could be a hackneyed novelistic trope—the confessional letter—is completely transformed in Gaige's sure and insightful hands….'Schroder' is a haunting look at the extreme desire for love and family, and how the mind can justify that need to possess what it cannot have. Almost, just almost, Schroder has us rooting for him.

Bookforum

Daring….As a case study of the unreliable narrator, Schroder is beautifully managed…the novel elegantly navigates its ethical razor's edge, bringing the reader along on a kind of joyride gone wrong….by turns dry, peculiar, expansive, and visionary.

BookPage

Schroder, the heartbreaking tale of a man who kidnaps his 6-year-old daughter, could be O My Darling author Amity Gaige's breakout work. Starring a doggedly compelling lead character and Gaige's signature smooth prose, this novel wows with its exacting, subtle grace….Gaige is a talent who deserves attention.

O: The Oprah Magazine

"A lyrical and poetic novel about the adverse ramifications of a little white lie that follows its teller throughout his life.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Brilliantly written....What could be a hackneyed novelistic trope--the confessional letter--is completely transformed in Gaige's sure and insightful hands....SCHRODER is a haunting look at the extreme desire for love and family, and how the mind can justify that need to possess what it cannot have. Almost, just almost, Schroder has us rooting for him."

Library Journal

First-generation East German immigrant Erik Schröder renames himself Erik Kennedy, an act that proves fateful decades later when he holes up with his daughter during a pitched custody battle with his estranged wife. From a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Outstanding Emerging Novelist; booming in-house enthusiasm.

Kirkus Reviews

A man's collapsed marriage and growing madness imperils his young daughter in this bracing third novel by Gaige (The Folded World, 2007, etc.). Narrator Eric Kennedy makes clear early on that he's done something very wrong: At the behest of his lawyers, he's writing his ex-wife to explain why he disappeared with their six-year-old daughter, Meadow, for a week. Like many unreliable narrators before him, he's bathing in narcissism and has a hard time facing facts, but Gaige makes the discovery process at once harrowing and fascinating. Eric escaped from East Germany with his father as a child and changed his name (from Erik Schroder, hence the title). As an adult, he was a caring husband and father, but his erratic behavior (like keeping a dead fox in the backyard as a kind of science project for Meadow) sunk the marriage, and his limited visitation rights prompted him to effectively kidnap Meadow and take her on an extended tour of upstate New York and New England. Abductors are hard to make sympathetic, but Gaige potently renders the embittered fun-house logic of a man who's lost his bearings. ("There was nothing in our parental agreement that said I couldn't drive around the outskirts of Albany at high speeds.") Gaige is interested in what widens and closes the gaps in our personalities between the past and present, madness and sanity, and she expertly works the theme like an accordion player until the climax, when Meadow is truly endangered, and Eric has a moment of clarity. The concluding plot turns are bluntly deus ex machina, and some characters, such as the aging muse for an '80s pop hit, hit the split personality theme in an obvious way, but overall the storytelling is remarkably poised. Smart, comic, unsettling, yet strangely of a piece--not unlike its disarming lead character.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Amity Gaige's Schroder is a triumph of voice. Part road trip escapade, part liar's lament, this absorbing, expertly crafted book takes the form of a self-serving but moving apologia written in an Albany jail cell by an untrustworthy but genuinely heartbroken father and ex-husband with astonishingly bad judgment. Filling hundreds of pages while seated on a stool that is "kindergarten short and dented like an old cookie sheet," he attempts to explain to his ex-wife why he absconded with their six- year-old daughter during his court-sanctioned weekly visit, precisely what happened during the seven days they went AWOL, and why he isn't who she thought she married.

Ordinarily, I'm about as keen on road trip novels as I am about driving — so I nearly made the mistake of leaving Schroder by the wayside. Of course I recognize the usefulness of a narrative device that literally keeps the action rolling and provides a world apart for its traveling characters. But with the notable exception of Nabokov's clever cross-country cat- and-mouse chase in Lolita, to which Schroder bears some resemblance, my response to such tales is often to feel trapped — in-car-cerated — and motion-sick long before new emotional borders are crossed.

There's nothing tedious or overly programmed about Schroder, however. By throwing a case of custodial kidnapping and assumed identity into the front seat, Gaige picks us up with her opening line — "What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance. My lawyer says I should tell the whole story" — and refuses to drop us off until we've reached her devastating destination. Schroder's deeply flawed narrator may have exhausted his wife's sympathy, but, remarkably, through Gaige's nuanced portrait, he manages to win ours. To a point.

If the outline of Schroder sounds vaguely familiar, that's because the much-publicized Clark Rockefeller hoax was a source of inspiration. You may recall the sensational case in which German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter assumed multiple aliases — including, most notably, that of a Rockefeller — to secure a toehold in American society. After his breadwinner wife, a Harvard M.B.A. and successful business consultant, filed for divorce, he went on the lam with their daughter in July 2008, was eventually convicted of parental kidnapping, and has since been indicted for a 1985 murder in Los Angeles. His story was the basis for a television movie, Who Is Clark Rockefeller?, and Mark Seal's 2011 nonfiction book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit.

Gaige's narrator, too, is an unreliable fraud who tries to leave behind his troubled German history in favor of a more promising American future. But, as in her two previous novels, O My Darling (2006) and The Folded World (2009), her focus is domestic, and specifically on marital strain and pain. What lifts Schroder above its essentially maudlin plot is its sure- footed prose, psychological acuity, and moral subtlety.

One way of looking at Schroder is as a story about passing. Instead of trying to pass for white — as Coleman Silk does in Philip Roth's The Human Stain — Gaige's protagonist, born Erik Schröder (with both a k and an umlaut) in East Berlin in 1970, tries to pass for an American with a famous last name and a sunnier background than his own. That initial deception, grounded in colossal insecurity and a desire to belong, engenders a lifetime of compounding lies.

The central trauma of Schroder's life occurred in 1975 when he and his electrician father managed to escape to West Berlin — without his mother. Why? Was she dead? The truth was in fact so painful that both he and his father had an unspoken pact never to talk about it, even after they immigrated to bleak Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1979. Gaige conjures a remarkable image, one of many in this novel, to describe the disconnection engendered by that transatlantic voyage: "The yolk of my heart came loose."

Young Erik's father dropped the umlaut but never bothered with naturalization. Erik, tired of being an outsider, took matters into his own hands as a teenager, creating a secret new identity in order to apply for a scholarship to an idyllic New Hampshire summer camp. He chose for his new surname that of the most famous "Berliner" — Kennedy — and invented a bucolic childhood on Cape Cod in a fictional enclave near Hyannis Port. As with racial passing, Schroder's transformation into Eric Kennedy ultimately necessitated a clean break from his past, including his reticent, distant German father.

Eric's imagined American childhood is a teenager's simple fantasy — yet it's one he's stuck with for decades, emblematic of his arrested development. Only in his desperation not to lose his adorable, wise daughter does he risk exposing his secret.

A key to Gaige's novel lies tucked in Schroder's assessment of the American family court system, filled with millions of despairing men and women waging custody battles. They're all deranged, he says, "Because, of course, there is one thing that really deranges us, and that is the disappearance of love." Three themes that connect Schroder's childhood and adulthood are the unbearable pain of lost love, "[h]ow abandonable a child is," and the excruciating eloquence of silence.

Schroder is by turns a terrifically fun and dangerously negligent father. Easily distracted from his daughter by his own narcissistic needs, he repeatedly loses focus, endangering his sweet "Butterscotch." He brings her to a "church where everyone was crying" — an AA meeting! — and, most horrifically, actually starts to stow his sleeping child in the trunk of his Mini Cooper (stolen from a friend) with the idea of escaping to Canada. Yet we come to understand the source of his failings — and, most movingly, to believe that he truly loves his daughter.

How convincing is Schroder's "pall of regret"? He's motivated by desperation to see Meadow again, but, as he reminds us, he's also driven by "a legal obligation to humanize myself. For my own defense." Could he really have believed, "right up to the moment when I saw myself on TV — that I had not 'kidnapped' Meadow but that I was merely very, very late to return her from an agreed-upon visit"? Is it possible to accept his argument that his "spontaneous field trip" with his sweet, trusting little girl was a "wrong thing-done in the service of rightness" and that, anyway, all childhood is in a sense an "involuntary adventure" embarked upon without consent?

Schroder naturally invites us to think about other stories involving unmoored, unreliable, often divorced parents who take their trusting, skeptical, wise, and often bewildered children on the road with them: Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here springs to mind, as does the 1973 Peter Bogdanovich movie, Paper Moon, starring Ryan O'Neal as a con man and his daughter Tatum O'Neal as his adorable albatross turned sidekick. When it comes to the annals of divorce, few offer a more fascinating, split picture than the Wolff brothers' memoirs: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, about his peripatetic childhood with their mother, and Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, chronicling his experiences with their father, an inveterate con man who falsified everything — except his paternal devotion. As in Schroder, one heartrending lesson from all these narratives is that even a deeply flawed parent can be a loving one.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin