Many column inches have been dedicated to the downtown New York literary scene and its hot twentysomething figureheads who are chronically online but also write autofiction and make zines in their spare time.
Madeline Cash could easily fit the bill. The 29-year-old lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown (though she recently traded it for Clapton), started an indie magazine called Forever, and wrote a collection of short stories that was summarised by her publisher as “the paperback that swallowed the smartphone”.
Yet Cash defies the diaristic lit-girl trope with her delightfully wacky debut novel, Lost Lambs. Everything in the small-town world of the novel is made up, from the names of prescription drugs which various characters ingest to the town’s church, Our Lady of Suffering, which is suffering from a gnat infestation. In a bit of typographical experimentation, the text is blighted by gnats, too — exterminate is written as “extermignate”; natural as “gnatural”.
Lost Lambs follows the Flynn family, who are all navigating highly peculiar matters of the heart. Head of the family Bud is toying with suicide after his creatively stifled wife, Catherine, has suggested opening up their marriage — or as she puts it, “expanding our horizons”.
Individual sentences often crescendo in weirdness or take a unexpected turn. “Bud Flynn took four Trizoletin he’d pillaged from his daughter’s bedroom, masturbated into a tea towel, and prepared to drive the minivan into the sea,” reads a classic chapter opening. Catherine’s favourite TV show, meanwhile, is the Real Housewives of Baghdad.
Daughters of misfortune
Catherine’s All Fours-style search for a “portrait worthy” life leads her to an oleaginous neighbour who seduces her with therapised, ChatGPT-worthy soundbites (“You’re not living. You’re just enduring”). Their three daughters, meanwhile, are left to run rampant.
There are flashes of Lena Dunham’s Girls in 17-year-old Abigail, the hot, popular eldest daughter who obsesses over her looks and blushes prettily when friends tell her she looks emaciated. (Incidentally, Dunham has described Cash as “a voice like no other”.)
There are flashes of Lena Dunham’s Girls in 17-year-old Abigail
Abigail dedicates her time to worrying about what pictures her family would post of her online if she died and trying to get through to her monosyllabic ex-soldier boyfriend, War Crimes Wes, who is actually a very sensitive soul. He appreciates art, abhors shoplifting from small businesses and suffers from acute IBS.
Perennially overlooked Louise wishes she were either very beautiful or had a “major disability” so that people would notice her. Severe middle child syndrome has pushed her towards radicalisation. She spends late nights discussing “religion and literature and what household chemicals were the most flammable” in an online chat room with her fundamentalist paramour.
What masquerades as a family saga reveals itself as a surveillance capitalism mystery. The precocious youngest Flynn daughter, Harper, is the first to realise that something fishy is going on at the town harbour, which is owned by Paul Alabaster, a nefarious billionaire on a quest for eternal youth.
Cinema-ready comedy
After such meticulous world building, I felt it was a shame that Cash takes us to the familiar arena of tech-bro overlords, determined not to die — we have X for that.
Still, Cash’s observations are sharp, her scenes cinematic — I’m not surprised that the film rights have already been snapped up. And above all, Lost Lambs is fun and funny.
I frequently found myself doing the insufferable: guffawing on the Tube. Navel-gazing autofiction girlies, take note.
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