Next of Kin: A Memoir
Spends a fair amount of time...in Hamilton’s childhood, with a welter of new details ... Winning as well as horrifying ... Demands an awed respect. It’s a naked, deboning sort of family accounting ... Hers isn’t a fun book, exactly, but it’s a feast.
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I’ve admired and even adored most everything she’s produced until now ... 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 ... Hamilton is well positioned, at least in theory, to examine its mythology. Instead, she traffics in it ... The elisions in this memoir — they are noticeable and significant — could almost be explained away by practical constraints ... The strongest portions of Next of Kin are Hamilton’s reflections about her mother.
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A lively, colorful, somewhat treacherous book ... Exactly why Jeffrey killed himself is an unanswerable question that Hamilton goes to exhaustive lengths to answer. Exactly why Hamilton chose to begin an affair with her sister’s husband is an answerable question that, unbelievably, she essentially skates right past. Where Hamilton is unflinching and vivid in her descriptions of the petty foibles and frailties of others, a privacy curtain descends when it comes to her own (worst) behavior ... Nor does she address or even acknowledge another troubling trait: a streak of adamantine coldness ... Hamilton does not discreetly bury her troubled, fascinating family with this memoir. She resurrects it to ensure her indelible, tendentious stamp is on the epitaph.
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