Madeline Cash’s ‘unhinged’ debut is Kafka meets Sedaris
- Written by Amber Gwynne, Lecturer in Writing, The University of Queensland
In Madeline Cash’s debut novel – lauded by Lena Dunham and already optioned for a limited series – the Flynns, like all unhappy families, are unhappy in their own way.
Bud and Catherine have just opened their marriage – reluctantly, on Bud’s part. Catherine is a day-drinking stay-at-home mom who longs for the rock star she thought she’d married. Bud is an accounts manager for the town’s main industry: Alabaster Harbor™, a port owned by an infamous billionaire tech magnate (the novel’s mysterious, white-toothed antagonist).
Then there are the girls. Bud and Catherine’s trio of school-aged daughters are in various states of crisis, if not criminality: Harper, 12, a “troublemaker with no origin myth”; Louise, 15, “afflicted middle child”; and Abigail, 17, “unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera”.
Throw in a local priest, add a side serving of conspiracy, and you have an unusual setup for a family novel. Yet Lost Lambs – inspired by Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and a slew of hard-boiled detective novels – somehow pulls it off.
Review: Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (Doubleday)
Cash, 29 years old, is founder and co-editor of the “subversive” feminist zine Forever Magazine, author of a 2023 short-story collection, and a regular contributor to the likes of Granta and The Paris Review.
Unsurprisingly, the vagaries of girlhood – a time when young women are so often porous but powerless – are central to the novel’s suburban ecosystem. Lost Lambs is rife with unease. Its themes are manifold. Sibling rivalry. Online grooming. The stagnation of intimate relationships. Crises of faith. The prevalence of both PTSD and sugary self-help fixes. The overwhelm and uncertainty of young love.
All of this chaos somehow finds its place in a narrative both timeless and specific to this moment: where work feels increasingly meaningless, information overload leads to ennui and truth is often stranger than fiction.
Being right or being happy
The story begins with insects – an infestation of gnats in the town’s Catholic church – and ends with a scourge of a different (blood-sucking) kind. In between, each of the Flynns is lost, searching for answers to life’s big questions. Who am I? What makes me special? Which institutions can we trust?
But other urgent questions begin percolating too. Why does the port’s cargo log feature so many “consistent inconsistencies”? What’s really going on in that mansion on the edge of town?
Something sinister is brewing. And Harper knows it. At the heart of her suspicions lurks Bud’s boss, Paul Alabaster, a super-rich nepo baby obsessed with youth and longevity.
“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Bud asks eventually, responding to Harper’s increasingly elaborate theories about the port’s “missing” cargo and Alabaster’s presence in the town. Here we meet one of the book’s most pervasive themes: that knowing too much can only result in anguish. (Or, as a hired investigator puts it: “It’s like a scary movie, right? If you go down to the basement […] you’ll find somethin’ horrible.”)
“Being right brings me happiness,” the ever-precocious Harper retorts.
But is there – the novel asks – any such thing as “right” or “happy”?
