Schroder

by Amity Gaige

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Attending summer camp as a boy, Erik Schroder, a first generation East German immigrant, adopts the name Eric Kennedy, a decision that will set him on an improbable and transformative journey. Years later, Erik escapes to Lake Champlain, Vermont, with his daughter, hiding from authorities amidst a heated custody battle with his estranged wife, Laura, who is unaware of his previous identity. From a correctional facility, Erik surveys the course of his life: his love for Laura, his childhood, and his experience as a father. Schroder is a sweeping, deftly imagined exploration of the identities we take on in our lives, those we are born with, and those we construct for ourselves.

Release date: February 5, 2013

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

“4 stars! 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.”

—People

“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.”

—New York Times Book Review

“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.”

—USA Today

“It is to the credit of Amity Gaige, 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.”

—Economist

“Brilliantly eliciting sympathy where, theoretically, none is deserved, this is a tense, ambitious, bravura exploration of the physical and psychological limits of identity—how we are seen by others, and what we make of ourselves.”

—Sunday Times (UK)

“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.”

—Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections

“[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.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Urgent and concise… Gaige’s storytelling [is] effortlessly spontaneous.”

—Guardian (UK)

“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, bringing 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.”

—Bookforum

“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.”

—Wall Street Journal

“Gaige’s spot-on prose makes this quirky parental drama irresistible.”

—Good Housekeeping

“A brilliant exploration of identity and belonging, and Gaige’s writing is beautiful.”

—Times (UK)

“Strikingly original.”

—Reader’s Digest

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

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“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.”

—Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

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

—New York Magazine

“A compelling and expertly plotted story.”

—Tatler magazine (UK)

“Heartbreaking… 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… She mixes warmth, lovely tenderness, and wit with fear and loathing, nakedness and shame, moving her narrative swiftly to an end that hits like a punch in the gut… An engrossing paradox. And Gaige is a talent who deserves attention.”

—BookPage

“[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.”

—Los Angeles Times

“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.”

—Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, and the New York Times bestselling short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here

“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.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“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.”

—David Bezmozgis, prize-winning author of Natasha and Other Stories and The Free World

“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.”

—Booklist

“Quiet and deeply introspective… 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.”

—Publishers Weekly

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

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“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.”

—BookReporter.com

“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.”

—Artvoice



Once upon a time, in 1984, I created another fateful document. On the surface, it was an application to a boys’ camp on Ossipee Lake in New Hampshire. I was fourteen and had been living in the United States for only five years. During those five years, my father and I had occupied the same top-floor apartment of a tenement in Dorchester, Mass., which if you’ve never been there is a crowded multiracial neighborhood in Boston’s southern hinterlands. Even though I had quieted my accent and cloaked myself in a Bruins hockey shirt, and tried to appear as tough and sulky as my Irish American counterparts who formed Dorchester’s racial minority, I was still mentally fresh off the boat and was still discovering, on a daily basis, the phenomena of my new homeland. I remember the electronic swallowing sound of a quarter by the slot of my first video-game machine, as well as the sight of a vibrating electronic toothbrush, and how, one day while I was waiting for the bus, a boy not much older than me drove up to the curb in a Corvette convertible and hopped out without use of the door. I remember seeing many sights like this and more, because the feelings they brought up were confusing. At first I’d feel a pop of childish wonder, but this wonder was followed by the urge to stuff it back, because if I were a real American I would not have been in the least impressed with any of it. Self-consciousness was my escort, a certain doubleness of mind that I relied upon to keep myself from asking stupid questions, such as when Dad and I drove across the border of Rhode Island one day on an errand, and I resisted asking why there was no checkpoint between state lines, for I had—if you can believe it—brought my German passport with me.

I first saw the brochure for Camp Ossipee in my pediatrician’s office. I studied it every time I was sick until I slipped it in my jacket and took it home. I stared at this brochure for weeks—in bed, in the bath, hanging from my pull-up bar—until its pages started to stick together. The American boys in the photographs hung suspended in the air between cliffside and lake water. They walked in threes portaging canoes. I started to envision myself swimming with them. I imagined myself crawling through the wheat or whatever, learning to track and to mushroom. I would be the go-to man, the boy out in front, not so much the hero but an outrider. I was particularly interested in the Ossipeean rite of passage available only to the oldest boys in their final year—a solo overnight camping trip on a remote island in the middle of the lake. And here is where my future self was really born to me, in this image: myself, Erik Schroder, man alive, stoking a fire in the night, solo, self-sufficient, freed from the astrictions of society. I would fall asleep as one boy and wake up the next day a totally different one.

All I had to do to apply to the camp was to fill out a form and write a personal statement. What sort of statement were they looking for? I wondered. What sort of boy? I sat at my father’s card table, gazing out the window at the corner of Sagamore and Savin Hill Ave., where two classmates of mine were fighting over a broken hockey stick. I slipped a piece of paper into my father’s typewriter. I began to write.

Mine was a tale that, by certain lights, was the truest thing I had ever written. It involved the burdens of history, an early loss of the mother, a baseless sense of personal responsibility, and dauntless hope for the future. Of course, by other lights—the lights that everyone else uses, including courts of law—my story was pure canard. A fraudulent, distorted, spurious, crooked, desperate fiction, which, when I met you, I lay bound at your feet. But this was 1984. I hadn’t met you yet. I wasn’t lying to you—I was just a child, sitting at my father’s typewriter, my legs trussed to the knee in white athletic socks, my hair still rabbit blond, not dark at the roots like it is now. I addressed the envelope. I filched a stamp. When it came time to sign the bottom of that crowded page, it was with some flair that I first signed the name by which you came to know me. The surname wasn’t hard to choose. I wanted a hero’s name, and there was only one man I’d ever heard called a hero in Dorchester. A local boy, a persecuted Irishman, a demigod. He was also a man who’d spoken to cheering throngs of depressed West Berliners circa 1963, leaving them with a shimmering feeling of self-regard that lasted long beyond his assassination, his hero status still in place when my father and I finally got there much later. In fact, you might say John F. Kennedy is the reason we showed up in this country at all.

I spent months intercepting the mail looking for my acceptance letter from Ossipee. The letter would offer me full acceptance to camp on scholarship, as well as sympathies for my troubles. I dreamt of this letter so often that I had a hard time believing it when it actually arrived. We at Ossipee believe that every boy deserves a summertime… We are dedicated to supporting boys from all circumstances… Come join us by the shores of our beloved lake… Ossipee, where good boys become better men. Yes, yes, I thought. I accept! I’ve got plenty of circumstances! My excitement was tempered only by the sound of Dad’s key in the downstairs foyer, and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to show him the letter itself, which was addressed to a different boy. Instead, I showed him the disintegrated brochure. I told him of the man-to-man phone call from the camp director. I even made the scholarship merit based, rounding out the fantasy for both of us. We trotted around the apartment all evening. It was as close as my father ever got to joyful abandon.

No one ever checked my story. When the time came, I took a bus two hours north from Boston to a bus stop called Moultonville, where a camp representative was to greet me and another scholarship boy we picked up in Nashua. When we got off the bus, a stout woman in canvas pants came toward us. This was Ida, the camp cook and its only female. The other boy mumbled an introduction. Ida looked at me. “Then you must be Eric Kennedy.”

Why did they believe me? God knows. All I can say is it was 1984. You could apply for a social security number through the mail. There were no databases. You had to be rich to get a credit card. You kept your will in a safety deposit box and your money in a big wad. There were no technologies for omniscience. Nobody wanted them. You were whoever you said you were. And I was Eric Kennedy.

For the next three summers, that’s who I was. Steady-handed Eric Kennedy. Iron Forge Eric Kennedy. Eric Kennedy of the surprisingly tuneful singing voice. My transformation was amazing. The first summer I spoke in a quavering voice that only I knew was meant to prevent any trace of an accent. I harbored a fear that some real German would come up to me and ask me, “Wo geht’s zum Bahnhof Zoo?” and I would answer. But this never happened, and besides, nobody distrusted me or scrutinized me or seemed to wish me harm; at Ossipee, the boys were taught that trusting other people was something you did for yourself, for your own ennoblement, and this old-fashioned lesson, however perversely I received it, is a debt I still hold to the place. Over time, I left the periphery of the group and moved toward the center of things. I took off my shirt and joined in dances around the campfire. I led the chanting for food in the dining hall. By the end of my first summer, they couldn’t shut me up. After that, I never really stopped talking.

The time eventually came for my solo camping trip. It was my third and final summer at Ossipee, a strikingly clement one. A steady wind swabbed the surface of the lake, forming darkly iridescent wavelets that tapped the bottom of the camp Chris-Craft. All the boys I’d lionized in previous summers were gone. The younger arrivals, their hair still bearing the ruts of combing, hung around on the dock watching me set off, and I realized that I had become the older boy, the one they’d remember once I was gone. The boathouse counselor motored me toward distant coordinates and left me there on a hard beach wearing a crown of gnats. The night was endless, but that isn’t the point of my story. The part I want to tell you about is the morning, how when I heard the sound of the Chris-Craft approaching through the fog, I zipped out of my nylon tent as from a skin and knew that I had achieved something truly monumental: I had chosen my own childhood. I had found a past that matched my present. And so, with the help of enthusiastic recommendations from the folks at Ossipee, as well as a series of forgeries I hesitate to detail here despite the fact that Xeroxes of them have been pushed across tables at me quite recently, I was accepted—as Eric Kennedy—to Mune College in Troy, New York. I was a work-study student at Mune, operating the tollbooth at a multistory parking garage, and the rest of my tuition was furnished via Pell Grant (which I paid back, by the way). I majored in communications. I was a B student. Smart in class, you know, but inconsistent when actual work on my own was required. My secret bilingualism led me to excel in the study of other languages—Spanish, even conversational Japanese. When I graduated, I got a job nearby as a medical translator at Albany’s Center for Medical Research, and there I stayed for six uneventful years, as free as a bird.

Of course, birds aren’t free. Birds do almost nothing freely. Birds are some of nature’s most industrious creatures, spending every available hour searching and hoarding and avoiding competitive disadvantage, busy just having to be birds. Like a bird, I was constantly at work being Eric Kennedy, and like a bird, I did not think of it as work. I thought of it as being. The earliest and cruelest deceptions had already happened—meaning, my deceptions of my father. Whenever I was Eric Kennedy, I’d made myself hard for Dad to contact. Even at Ossipee, I had told him there were no telephones in the wilderness of New Hampshire, but that if he wanted me to call him, I would happily set out on foot to the nearest town, and of course he said Nein, nein, Erik. Then, in measured English, I will see you when I see you.

Right. He would see me when he saw me, which was seldom. During college, I was like any other young man, busy trying to appear more interesting than I was—you know, amassing a music collection, composing mental manifestos, once or twice appearing in a piece of student theater. I drove down to Dorchester only when absolutely necessary. I commenced alone, in my black gown and mortarboard, and then waited until July to bring Dad up for a campus tour, when the place was desolate except for the students at an adult tennis camp. I had befriended a childless professor during my time at Mune, and it was this man, not my father, who cosigned my lease on my first apartment, a sunny one-bedroom kitty-corner from Washington Park.

I was happy in Albany and rarely left it. I liked its protected horizons, its belligerent small-time politicians. And there was always a girl—some girl or another—and laughing, and making fun of tourists in the South Mall. These relationships were easy and promise-free. I had a talent for choosing women who were already temperamentally predisposed toward happiness and therefore wouldn’t use me as a catchall for their disappointments. In my free time, I worked erratically on my research (see page 15) and played soccer with a bunch of foreign transplants on a hill we borrowed from the College of Saint Rose. And the thing after that, I supposed, would be the thing after that.

I did. . .