NEXT OF KIN: A Memoir, by Gabrielle Hamilton
Over the past quarter-century, Gabrielle Hamilton has established herself as an outrageously talented chef and restaurateur, the kind who can transform roughly 30 seats on East First Street into a Manhattan hot spot confident enough to offer sardines and Triscuits with a swipe of mustard, or to set pistachios on fire and call them an appetizer.
It might seem cosmically unfair that she’s also an excellent writer — one of her detours in life was acquiring an M.F.A. — who is better at stringing words together than many who do nothing else. Her 2011 book “Blood, Bones and Butter” is rightfully held up as an exemplar of chef-written memoirs. It brims with entrails, carnality, hunger and qi.
I’ve admired and even adored most everything she’s produced until now. “Next of Kin” is a new memoir that purports to examine some terribly upsetting episodes: the suicide of Hamilton’s eldest brother, the sudden death of another brother and Hamilton’s various estrangements from every single member of her family. But despite a deep well of material, “Next of Kin” lacks the force and vision of her previous book, and its parts fail to cohere.
The youngest of five, Hamilton was raised in Pennsylvania amid streams and meadows, in a converted silk factory befitting the family’s bohemian outlook. Her French mother, a former ballet dancer, was her culinary inspiration. Her father was a set designer whose distaste for the mundane laid the foundation for the family ethos: “Refrain from littering the world with any dilettante-ish efforts or minor private achievements likely destined only for the landfill of Mediocrity.”
She compares her father to Saturn, who would sooner devour his children than see them surpass him; his greatest adversary was his eldest son, Jeffrey. A prickly, tormented free spirit — as a young man, Jeffrey hitchhiked to Africa, enchanting his family with stories of eating fried termites — he foundered in middle age, embodying what Hamilton called a “diamonds and burlap” life as the graduate of a rarefied college who hauled trash for a living. She idolized this self-appointed “Marquis of Debris” until he exasperated her.
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