Gabrielle Hamilton’s succulent “The Lamb Roast,” in this week’s issue, is an enchanting evocation of her rural Pennsylvania youth, when she lived with her family in a “wild castle built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill.” It centers on an annual party her father threw, featuring a spring-lamb roast. Yes, it’s nostalgia, but it’s exquisite nostalgia, filled with “people and fireflies and laughter.” Some of the details are amazing, e.g., her mother’s breath (“exhale of wine, vinaigrette, and tangerine”), a lion tamer’s ass (“high, round, and firm, like two Easter hams”), a Coke machine that “glowed like something almost religious.”
I relished the specificity of Hamilton’s writing, e.g., the names of local businesses (Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Cal’s Collision Repair, Black’s Christmas tree farm, the LaRue bottle works, Johnson’s apple orchard). There’s poetry in those names – you can feel it in the way Hamilton uses them; it’s almost as if her memoir emerges from these names. Consider this inspired passage:
The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy’s shoes with no socks, hanging on to the railing, letting the wind blast my face. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the little patches of bracing coolness, and the sudden bright warmth, and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. Finally, we got to Johnson’s apple orchard, where we picked up wood for the fire.
In “The Lamb Roast,” Hamilton shows a love of language. She works its colors and textures into lyrical, sensual constructions. Here are two examples:
It was a lush setting. The beer, wine, and soda chilled in the creek, and the weeping willows bent their branches down over the water.
The sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminaries, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat.
Writing like that – I devour!
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