Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her debut novel about the Flynn family, is a witty, quickfire book set in a small American town, punch-drunk on clever, skewering lists and infested typographically by the gnats that plague the local church the family attends (“explagnation”, “extermignation”).
The Flynns are in a mess. It was easy for Catherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve acquired three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine succumbs to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He’s rekindled her artistic ambitions, prompting her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and proclaim an open marriage. She doesn’t yet know that Jim has a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement (“each of these pussies has touched my life”).
Harper, 13, is a child genius who has taught herself six languages but is “mythically bored” and regularly suspended from school. Louise suffers from the “plight of the middle child”, stuck “in a prison of her own mundanity”. Escape is offered by yourstruly, an online lover who advises her to invest in equipment to make explosives. Finally, there’s 17-year-old Abigail, the family beauty. Too much makeup tells men you’re only interested in one thing, her mother warns. “Good,” Abigail responds. “It saves me the trouble of telling them myself.” Her latest conquest is War Crimes Wes, a former soldier who now works in private security for Paul Alabaster, the town’s megalomaniac billionaire shipping magnate, who also employs Bud in his accounts team.
So here they are, ready to go, in need of a plot – and Cash turns out to be brilliant at plotting, an often underrated art. It’s provided by a combination of church and commerce. Between them, Paul Alabaster and God compete for the Flynns’ souls, with God mediated by Miss Winkle, the local do-gooder who runs the “Lost Lambs” support group that Bud is sent to when he’s too depressed to function at work. One night, a drunken Bud kisses her clumsily as tea splashes from their mugs and they immediately have “wholesome and arousing” sex that turns out to be what Bud needs, more than sex with his hot but dissatisfied wife. Bud now attempts, in the clumsy but ultimately noble manner of the comic hero, to be a better person, and this brings him into conflict with Paul Alabaster.
For ages, Harper – bored enough to go through the Alabaster accounts on the family computer – has been telling Bud that there is a shipping container delivered annually that isn’t properly accounted for on his spreadsheets. Now that Bud is trying to be his best self for Miss Winkle, he asks Alabaster some difficult questions. Meanwhile War Crimes Wes is also investigating Alabaster, worried that Abigail has been marked out as the sole female recipient of an invitation to his next high-security party. And Abigail’s best friend, Tibet, a conspiracy theory addict, has been drawn towards speculation that Alabaster’s yearning for eternal youth has led him into vampiric blood sucking. Of course it’s all going to coalesce around the party itself; of course the conspiracy theorists will turn out to have been right all along; of course the sisters will find that they’re more loyal and more sisterly than they’ve feared.
The priestesses of the book are Miss Winkle and Tibet. Miss Winkle brings an interestingly unfashionable vision of goodness. “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Bud asks Harper at the start of the book. Then he chose happiness; by the end, Miss Winkle has revealed that there’s no happiness without rightness, and everyone in his increasingly extended family is learning it too. This goodness is complemented by Tibet’s new kinds of truth. She is convinced that if we each experience “only a tiny fraction of reality”, then we have to come up with new models of pooled knowledge. This leads in her case to an odd vindication of online conspiracy theories, but the novel itself offers its own vision of collective truth.
Cash’s virtuosic wit allows her to warm hearts at the same time as satirising the world. The plot may sometimes take up too much of the novel’s air; the typographical gnats may be a little winsome (should that be “wignsome”?); but in an age when the conspiracy theorists do indeed turn out to be disturbingly right as well as disturbingly wrong, and when old-fashioned tenderness and laughter are ever more required, Cash is a happy and energising new voice.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins). Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
