"What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance," announces Erik Schroder at the opening of Amity Gaige's arresting and affecting novel. It is written in the form of an apologia from prison to his estranged wife, Laura, in which he attempts to justify his abduction of their six-year-old daughter. There is a breath ofHumbert Humbert about Erik, and given the reader's natural suspicion of a man who abducts his little girl it feels at first as if this story will develop along a sinister path, but Gaige's lonely, loving fantasist is an altogether more benign creation.
Schroder is not a kidnapper but a good father in the midst of a bitter custody fight; not machiavellian, but rash. He understands it looks bad, this stealing of their child, but it was an act of spontaneous desperation. And his situation is desperate. He has a great deal more than his recent crime to account for. He must explain how it is that he is a German named Erik Schroder, when Laura knew him only as Eric Kennedy from Twelve Hills.
Schroder fled East Germany with his father as a child, taking the name Kennedy at the age of 14 when he falsified his identity on an application to summer camp. Finding he was more attractive, more acceptable to himself as Kennedy than he had ever been as the excluded, bullied foreigner Schroder, he could not shake off the lie. Although he questions the wisdom of having introduced himself as Eric Kennedy to Laura when they met, what else, he argues, could he have done? He was not lying "to her" – the lies started long before they met.
Erik speeds Meadow northwards in a stolen car and events are punctuated by his explorations of the past. Even as we put aside our suspicions about him we are alerted by other inconsistencies, episodes he reveals. At one point, busy projecting his imagined idea of himself to a stranger on a sunny beach, he doesn't think to check on Meadow, who walks fully clothed into the deep waters of Lake George. He muses upon an episode in her earlier childhood when he taught her the harshness of mortality by observing with her the decomposing body of a fox, an event he remembers as "the final straw" in Laura's disillusionment with their marriage.
Schroder has acquired a sunny, bluff exterior; he is given to expressions like "hooey" and "will you look at that!". He has never, he is at pains to point out, actually claimed association with those Kennedys, but nor, if questioned, does he deny it. He simply leaves a modest pause. Pauses are a theme of this book. Schroder "collects pauses" – literary, cultural, political – for Pausology: An Experimental Encyclopaedia, as yet unwritten. No wonder Laura was mystified; he sold himself to her as a Robert Redford, not a German intellectual contemplating a crippling existential lack.
There is a dark undertow to the book and to its narrator. He is not what we fear, but not quite what he would like to think he is, either, and the parallels with Nabokov are more lyrical than the signposts of foreigner, road-trip and kidnap. They lie in Schroder's immigrant's view of America, the beautiful yet dissociated descriptions of the landscapes through which he drives with Meadow. English is his second language, which animates the flow of his narrative voice. He describes postwar Berlin as a "mirror image of the splintered whole … divided fractiously … a little smackerel of it even going to French …" with a Nabokovian playfulness. This is not to say the novel is derivative; it is contemplative, poetic certainly, but the narrative is urgent and concise and Gaige's storytelling effortlessly spontaneous.
As we come to understand Schroder's fantasy-self and the void behind it, we fear his and Meadow's increasing endangerment; we care for them – not least because of Meadow, who takes his love for granted. She is stoical, stubborn, smart and, with echoes of another great American icon of self-deception, somewhat reminiscent of Holden Caulfield's little sister, Phoebe. Meadow is Schroder's confessor. It is to her that he first confides the truth about himself and dares to revisit his past. Whether he will be reconciled with it and forgiven, or remain splintered and lacking, is a question that resonates beyond the last page.
• Sadie Jones's latest book is The Uninvited Guests (Vintage).