Day: March 1, 2013

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.

Most nights, Red and I make our final around 10 p.m. We check the pasture gates, make sure the chicken coop is closed, make sure the doors and gates in the barns are okay, try and eyeball the donkeys and the sheep. Many times on night rounds, we find something amiss, something forgotten and once in awhile, something in trouble.

Our friend and neighbor Jane Keyes dropped off a rumored treasure, the memoirs of Florence Qua Walrath, who owned the farm before us and lived her for nearly 80 years. Her spirit and character drew us to the farm and infuse the 1840 farmhouse still. Her memoir begins in her no-nonsense style: “It all started four miles north of Salem, N.Y. it was a quaint old farmhouse…” Florence’s memoirs are neatly typed on good white paper and are in a neat red and green binder.

Jane, the long-time Jackson, N.Y., town clerk, was a close friend of Florence’s and was gracious and thoughtful enough to share the memoirs with us. I can’t wait to read Florence’s story and learn more about her remarkable life – she went swimming when she was 100 years old and when they took her license away, she drove her mower to the lake – and I’ll try and share some of it with you. Many people have been asking about it since I first mentioned it a week or so ago.

The history and feeling of the farmhouse are powerful. I write this in the formal parlor at the front of the house. Florence loved the farmhouse and many people have thanked us for not tearing it apart or changing it radically. We will never do that. I came to this house when I stopped to take a photo of Rocky and met Florence. Maria and I both plan to read this book over the weekend. As a writer, this document is even more precious to me.

Zelda is a strong woman. She is smart, strong. She stands up for herself. She protects the other sheep. She meets the gaze of the camera lens squarely and without hesitation or apology. She will not wear a coat. She has run over Red and knocked me down. Strong women are the hope of the world, I believe. They can be tough, but they are loving. They do not posture and preen like men. They do not make war or glorify the shedding of blood. They have conviction, but listen. They negotiate, empathize, resolve. They are the hope of the world. This is Strong Women Month at the farm.