Twenty-nine-year-old Madeline Cash is, according to NYLON magazine, a “literary it-girl” and one of the darlings of downtown Manhattan’s so-called Dimes Square alt lit scene. This is a cohort of young writers who are trying to find a new literary voice in this age of social and technological fragmentation and distraction. As such, it’s somewhat inevitable that her debut novel Lost Lambs has been hailed as one of the buzziest publications of the year.
What is surprising is that said novel is set in a quiet, unassuming, unnamed American suburb nowhere near New York, and the internet plays only a minor role in the story that unfolds there. Although its preoccupations are of the moment, the genesis of Lost Lambs can be traced back to those family-focused, suburban tales that dominated American fiction in the decade of Cash’s birth: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993), Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994), , and of course, the behemoth that was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). These were novels in which the rumbling, shamefully concealed discontent and dysfunction found in fiction from the 50s and 60s – the likes of Richard Yates or John Cheever’s – exploded into more visible, disruptive expressions of individual, familial and societal anarchy, corruption and violence.
Bud and Catherine Flynn’s marriage is on the rocks. He’s an accounts and systems manager at the local harbour, their three daughters attend the local Catholic school, and they own a home and a minivan. But behind this respectable suburban façade, rot has set in. Catherine doesn’t work; nor has she stocked the fridge in weeks, whiling away her vacant hours obsessively working out, smoking weed and necking vodka. She has recently told Bud she wants to “open” their marriage, since which he’s been sleeping in the minivan out in the driveway, eyeballing his “halo of hair loss” in the rearview mirror, and contemplating suicide.
Navigating the rubble of this messy, unhappy “arrangement” are their three daughters: Abigail, 17; Louise, 15; and Harper, 12. Think the 2020s equivalent of Eugenides’ Lisbon sisters, having reaped-cum-weathered feminism, parental neglect, and an inevitable, albeit implicit childhood diet of Taylor Swift albums. Abigail’s an acknowledged beauty – “pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera” – and something of a hopeless romantic to boot. Her first “boyfriend” was her art teacher, and now she’s dating a man in his twenties who goes by the moniker “War Crimes Wes” – an ex-special forces mercenary who works private security and suffers from chronic digestive issues. Not exactly every parent’s dream, so it’s lucky Bud and Catherine have other things on their mind. Harper, meanwhile, is a precocious self-styled “troublemaker” – that’s “tween delinquent” to everyone else. She speaks seven languages, is smarter than any of the adults, and all in all “too clever for her own good.” Then there’s Louise, the classic middle child, overlooked and ignored. She spends all her time in an online chatroom, hidden away in the kids’ old treehouse, where, as Harper points out (see what I mean about Harper!) the scent of fertiliser hangs worryingly in the air…
A spot of domestic terrorism is nothing to get one’s kickers in a twist about though. The family soon have a bigger problem on their hands in the form of Paul Alabaster, nefarious local tech billionaire, boss of both Bud and War Crimes Wes, though each offers him a very different skill-set – or lack thereof, in Bud’s case. Luckily, Harper (again!) is on the case. Cue some dodgy dealings down at the harbor, and some Eyes Wide Shut-esque escapades after dark in Alabaster’s mansion.
Cash is a confident and commanding stylist with an eye for oddball characters and fast-paced, screwball comedy of the Nell Zink variety, the vim of her wit and wordplay striking a sneakily discordant note with the more expected drone of suburban malaise. Sometimes she veers a little close to gimmickry – the gnat infestation at the local church with which the book opens infects the very words on the page (“extermignate,” “gnatural,” “termignate”); Alabaster HarborTM never appears without its trusty trademark; and every small business owner in town loves a pun, (the nineteenth-century-themed British pub Olive or Twist, Aunt Tiques’ junk shop, and Anne Frank’s Dairy, the ice-cream parlour that “dognates” a portion of its proceeds to a charity that fights antisemitism) – but for the most part, she’s in full flippant, jaunty command. Even her throwaway sentences bounce to a skittish but catchy beat: “Years ago, Bud’s parents moved a few states inland to a minor city that touted record-breaking heat near a college that reported record-breaking date rape.”
Lost Lambs is a highly entertaining caper in which teenage girls are very much in control, a dynamic that offers up a fresh counterpoint to societal fears about their potential for exploitation and victimisation. One gets the sense that Cash isn’t taking it too seriously, and neither should we. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be impressed: it takes skill to write with such an easy lightness of touch. Her coup is that she pulls off this slapdash irreverence. She exposes the gory carcass of the Flynns’ floundering union, but then tells us to get a grip. After all, as another character enlightens poor, beleaguered Catherine, “marriage is just an institution that informs the tax code.”
[Further reading: The Ten Year Affair made me hate myself]
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The characters laugh or go crazy, and so do we