Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash: book review

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Lost Lambs is what happens when you don't trust the book you have and decide you have to graft a plot on it later that is big and flashy and makes no sense for the original story you were trying to tell. Which is to say that this is not a fatal error to make as a writer considering the book garnered a marketing push of sufficient magnitude to make it the first big book of the year. That, in itself, is an interesting place to approach a book from as it inherently makes you read the book from a slightly different angle. Instead of wandering into a novel and letting it tell you about itself, you're trying to excavate from page one what makes this book so good. And there are many things that make Lost Lambs unique, fun, engaging, and worthy of attention. All of those things make the spot where you can see Cash lost faith in the wealth of amazing things she already had more disappointing. 

The novel centers on the Flynn family—three daughters, a husband, and a wife. They live in a weird, slightly titled version of what I took to be a California beach town where everything is a hyper-real version of our world that lets Cash play with the absurdity of our daily lives in an interesting way. And even in this strange version of place, the Flynns are a strange family. At the open of the book, Bud and Catherine have decided to open their marriage. Bud is not pleased by this and feels like an unwilling participant. Somehow, the private matters of their marriage are broadcast to the whole town, as happens in small places, and as Cash describes, the new arrangement is less an act of sexual liberation and more "... a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters."

We then dive deeper into this family who has a baby tooth wind chime on the porch, a messy house covered in cigarette ash, and three daughters who are falling apart in their own ways. Harper is the youngest—twelve—and struggling with a precocity that is under recognized. So she often gets into trouble, at one point getting sent to a wilderness camp for troubled children where "They pretended to cry at the campfire to earn dental floss." Then there's Louise, the middle child, who feels so invisible and unloved she falls into an online terrorist organization because one of the anonymous users sweet talks her a little. She also picks up some of the religious threads that run through Lost Lambs as she tries to cash in intense devotion to any religion as an escape valve from her life. The oldest daughter, Abagail, is a senior in high school and gorgeous like her mother but also imbued with her disordered view of food and her body. Abagail starts dating a much older guy, nicknamed "War Crimes Wes," who mostly exists to tie in the cartoonishly evil tech billionaire (I mean, billionaire kind of implies cartoonishly evil) that comes in later. 

While the daughters vary greatly in their development on the page with Harper being paid the most effort and attention while I forgot Louise existed for most of the book, it's really in crafting the parents where this novel shines. In looking back at the lines and passages I made note of, they're almost entirely from Bud's point of view. He's maybe the most interesting character because he's just trying to get by in his middle manager life when his wife throws the curveball of opening their marriage. He gets sent to a support group at the Church, the Lost Lambs, over it, and as men often do, he haplessly ends up falling into a deeply enriching relationship with Miss Winkle, the group leader, while the guy his wife opened the marriage for is a total loser. This disruption in Bud's life reenergizes him from the zombie-like state in which he's lived his life, and it induces a strangely healing version of a midlife crisis. Cash has a gift for writing Bud, for clearly loving him but also crafting the most artful jabs when revealing his character—"Having failed at being a rock star, Bud Flynn could not fail at being an accounts manager." Later in this passage, Bud complains to himself about being held late by his manager, but it's not actually late, he's just used to leaving early. In an argument with Catherine about whether she's still the woman of her dreams he shouts, "Who cares! You're the woman of my reality." And as his wife sinks into her much less fruitful midlife crisis—withdrawing from family life to smoke cigarettes in the bathtub and chase various affairs to make up for the hole in her chest left by giving up her art practice to be a full-time mom of three—Bud takes on the brunt of the parenting, making room for some of the best, most heart-filled in their own absurd little ways, moments of the novel. At one point, Cash intones after a conversation between Bud and Harper, "His daughter would always be smarter, but he would always be older." At the end of the day, Cash succeeds most at capturing a phase of life she has not yet lived between Catherine's confused search for identity that follows the pattern of that All Fours-style middle age burnout book (which is interesting to see explored within the context of a much broader novel) and Bud's hapless flop into becoming a person with wants and desires again. They render in the novel with a far greater degree of nuance than anyone else, and I wish the book had kept a tighter hold on the family. 

I mean, how good is, "The adage like riding a bike came to mind, but Bud doubted he'd hold his own on a bicycle these days."

So we have the Flynn family trying to make it work through their parents coming unraveled and their daughters being in the icky sticky depths of teenagehood. It's fascinating, it's entertaining, they're goofy drama on wheels with a surprisingly deep amount of heart. Perfect novel, right? 

But instead of giving Louise a real personality beyond her vague and absurd attachment to a terrorist cell, the book has to get bigger. The book gets insecure about being a domestic novel with a zany setting that adds some extra flavor to our world. As you read, the book just expands and expands and expands in a fashion that rather than upping the tension entirely deflates it. You get diverted away from this family and placed into the heads of far too many random, tangential characters. Every time this switch occurs, we have to backtrack at least somewhat to get their views on the last event. And this is largely done in service of the Tech Billionaire Subplot which overtakes the back half of the book and draws in the disparate threads of Bud's soulless corporate job, the strange church that none of the Flynn's attend but their life circles around, and Abagail's older boyfriend. 

Paul Alabaster sucks the oxygen out of the book. Paul Alabaster was constructed entirely to have a clear villain, some blockbuster stakes, and to hijack a perfectly good book with some capital P plot that has nothing to do with the story's inherent tension. We move, around the middle of the book, from it being a book about a unique family that is playing with precision of language, a touch of absurdity, and a creativity in voice to being a mystery/action adventure novel centering a billionaire that blends Brian Johnson's creepy determination to use his wealth to never age with Jeffery Epstein's human trafficking and high profile parties (though Cash keeps making the point in the text that his interest in young girls doesn't have anything to do with sex, his motivations are purely of the Johnson flavor with more unsavory methods). While the mystery of what's going on with Paul Alabaster and his front company is interesting—Cash is a good writer, she manages to plant clues and make reveals with effective timing—it is entirely divorced from the point of the novel and takes us on a massive diversion from what Cash is truly trying to do. This is proven by the way this massive plot point is tied up at the end of the book. She runs down what happens to each of the powerful men involved and also his victims in basically one chunky paragraph so she can shove all of that out of the way and get back to what was important all along: The Flynns and the evolution of their family dynamic. 

Call me crotchety or old fashioned or whatever but nothing upsets me more than a wild plot thread that could be entirely removed from the book and not impact the arc of a single character or the ultimate outcome. It really zapped the energy she'd created in the opening, and I found myself struggling to want to read the novel from around page 70 to 250 because there was plenty of action, but it was entirely divorced from the heart of the characters, so there wasn't any real tension.

As is probably clear by now, Cash takes big swings with her debut novel. That's contributing to the attention it's getting. Love it or hate it, there's something happening here, something that I can't really liken to anything else on the market at the moment. The most striking element of the book, at least through the first half, is the voice. There is a precision of voice and a hyper-detail on the sentence level that is utterly fascinating. Every detail is a little brighter and more absurd than you'd expect. Cash does a good job of turning up our world to more easily and effortlessly extract points from it. Catherine sits down after a long day to watch The Real Housewives of Baghdad. At the beach clean up Bud, "... jabbed at some seaweed, which turned out to be a woman's hair extension." Their town feels like a suburb of LA, but it is also not our world in hard to define ways. Cash doesn't give us a particular city, but she imbues it with such a strong sense of place, I could visit it in my head afterwards. There's an incredible amount of talent there. 

At the same time, though, the intensity of this can get fatiguing. I thought, at times, that this would've made a brilliant short story where the heft of the prose-work she's doing would be balanced by the brevity. Just a shot of this family in the rich, slightly off-kilter setting. And it is hard to sustain. Cash gets much, much looser towards the end of the novel as the action takes over. She seems to forget about textural elements she was deeply devoted to in the beginning, like making any word that has an "n" sound resembling that of "gnat" to be written with a "gn" to literarily impose the church's gnat infestation throughout the text. A gnat infestation that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme? These are the moments where the playfulness with language crosses over into cutesy in a way that sent a flare of frustration every time my dyslexic brain stumbled over a word that mysteriously had an extra "g". Still, no one can say Cash doesn't leave it all on the floor with her debut. 

Despite, in the murky middle, Lost Lambs feeling like a book I needed to get through, I finished the novel and felt a deep fondness for the Flynn family and for the world that Cash created in this novel. Which is strange because, beyond the final image, the ending isn't particularly effective. The book majorly veers off course in the third act and takes on a feel that kept reminding me of Bunny by Mona Awad, but Cash's final picture of the eccentric Flynn family, together again in a restaurant, now in an even more paramutated form than before but also happy, was enough to remind me that I did grow attached to these girls and their parents. I wanted them to be happy. I was glad to have read the novel. 

Overall: 3.5