by Shay M. Lopez

Let’s say you’re a male in your mid-50s. You’ve become what might be described as a “successful” partner in a small firm – you’ve got plenty of money, beveled glass on the doors of your home, gold cuff-links on your shirts, three fingers of top-shelf gin in a tumbler each night to go with the evening news.

 

But your marriage went to shit last year, your divorce has been finalized, and though you have a beautiful girlfriend nearly 20 years your minor, you continue to maintain the lie that you’re still married, pretending the wife’s away on business when you’re planning your next rendezvous. Your commute to work isn’t from the posh suburban Chicago digs where you used to live, but from a suite at the Residence Inn. The last time you visited your father you argued over what he should eat for dinner as he withered away in a La-Z-boy coughing spittle on himself, angry and bitter. Days later, he died.

 

The afternoon of your father’s funeral you’re frazzled, to say the least, and you need a cigarette to take off the edge. Sitting in your parked truck you see your life melting away into the concrete and glass and pavement and plastic of the urban landscape. And then she approaches you, “a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes” in a crooked tube top and shoes too big for her feet. “I’m supposed to ask you for a cigarette,” she explains, having been put up to the dare by her two friends who eye you from across the dirty parking lot, and it so irks you, this tiny child dressed like a vamp bumming a smoke, striking a chord so dissonant in the moment that your blood rises. “Let me play a trick on your friends,” you say, and before you realize why you’re doing it, you continue, “Let’s pretend that I’m kidnapping you.” You pull the strange child into your truck. You drive her home immediately, scolding her along the way for the naivete that so enraged you. “I could be taking you somewhere to kill you. You know that? It was a dumb thing to do, coming up to me like that. Wasn’t it?” You drop her off in front of her shabby apartment building, and the next day, you’re not sure why you return to the same parking lot where you met. She returns, too.

 

You are David Lamb, main character in Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb. David Lamb’s life is unraveling in more ways than one, and as it does so, we begin to see him react in irrational ways that are unexpected, even to himself. Unsure why exactly, David befriends the girl, Tommie, and arranges clandestine meetings to take her on short outings, treats her to nice lunches, and presents her with small tokens of his admiration, including a silver pencil sharpener that had been his father’s. He even calls her his “silver girl.” To David Lamb, this seems to be the natural evolution of his growing desire to save Tommie from a dismal future and spoiling her as something the poor girl deserves. For the reader, however, this behavior is unsettling in the least, and reveals David’s struggle to reconcile his own shortcomings. When Lamb convinces Tommie to go on what he promises to be a five-day road trip to a cabin in the Rockies the reader is called to traverse the same roads toward unforeseen discoveries as those the characters travel.      

 

Comparisons between Nadzam’s Lamb and Nabokov’s Lolita are inevitable, if only for the relationship of a middle-aged man and young girl, but Lamb becomes a sort of character study of how a man’s deceit, self-justification and manipulation blur the line between right and wrong, truth and delusion, nurture and abuse.

 

When they’ve reached the cabin which stands in disrepair and the reader realizes their trip will last far longer than five days, the novel builds in tension and intimacy. The relationship between man and child stands as precariously as a house of cards.

 

David teaches Tommie how to build a cook fire like a scout, allows her to sip at his whiskey, shows her how to wash in the river and track in the snow, but he also keeps her hidden in the cabin with tarps obscuring the windows, provides fake names and lies to an inquisitive neighbor that he’s simply looking after his fatherless niece. But the more he invests of himself in the child, the more we see David’s attempt to escape from his own reality. And as with any road trip that seeks escape, the traveler is eventually called home, literally and metaphorically.

 

Good literature, or any art for that matter, challenges us in unexpected ways. Lamb is in no way a comforting read. At times, it is downright creepy – I found myself cringing through much of it – though page after page of richly textured, lyrical writing compels the reader to move forward, wondering where the characters will take him next. And that might be a dark place. But I have also found myself, long after reading it, wondering of the characters and their decisions, considering their burdens, and questioning their fates.

 

So let’s say you, male in your mid-50s, are headed back toward Chicago. The 11-year-old girl asleep in the seat beside you has seen and felt things she could never have imagined. So have you. You have given, but you have also taken. You feel more alive than you have in years, yet you also feel a death in you that continues to open like a chasm. You have gone so far, and come back. But have you? And what of the girl? The truth is … .