From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

John Freeman on Amity Gaige

SchroderNovels of the U.S. are full of hucksters, four-flushers, and all manner of conmen and snake oil sellers. We love these characters because they can talk, spin tall tales, and pull a fast one on people too square to improvise, and on all these fronts Schroder does not disappoint.

Gaige has gone one-step further than ventroliquising good old Yankee hucksterism, however, by giving her anti-hero a voice that breaks and warps, and through these fractures, begins to reveal a wound. Erik is desperately in need of love, but too broken to feel it purely. Thus, as he goes back over the failure of his marriage, the collapse of a peculiar research project, his voice vibrates with the dolorous registers of self-pity and with boastful pride.

And then just when you think Erik is a creep – he kidnaps his daughter, and the novel is a kind of confession/justification – Gaige slowly draws him back from the brink. The kidnapping forces Erik to care for his daughter with an intensity he has never fully committed to. He finally fesses up to his daughter about his true identity. He begins to muse on the greed that lives within him, a greed that crowded out the generosity necessary for true love.