Schroder – one man’s journey into night

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her on a carnivalesque road trip through the New England countryside, a trip that progresses along increasingly blurred borderlines – physical, moral, mental.

Schroder, Amity Gaige’s UK debut, is presented not as fiction but as ‘a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance’- not a novel but a ‘document’.