Warm Pastoral
Madeline Cash, Lost Lambs
Doubleday, 336pp, £16.99, ISBN 978-1529946123
reviewed by Alice Brewer
Madeline Cash’s debut novel Lost Lambs has a distinctly American feeling for the pastoral: no one is ever far from a pesticide, an institution or a source of non-perishable food. Half intergenerational bildungsroman and half technocratic noir, the novel consists of a series of neatly plotted dualisms: corporation versus flock, coming-of-age versus eternal youth, vampirism versus bucolicism, layman versus clergy.
Its world is unwholesome and Roman Catholic, like a Henry Darger landscape. All Cash’s proper nouns are fictional, giving it the vague air of fantasy; every hard ‘n’ in the text has been replaced with ‘gn’ on account of a persistent gnat infestation at Our Lady of Suffering, the neighbourhood church, Our Lady of Suffering. Recalling Darger’s Vivian Sisters in The Realms of the Unreal — a group of human-looking aliens fighting to free a group of woodland planets from child exploitation — the novel’s nominal centre is a group of morbidly precocious teenage girls. (It is always ‘girls’, not ‘children’). Harper Flynn is 13 and can speak six languages and hack into her father’s work computer; she is aware, like Cash, that ‘all complex female characters needed conflict and adversity’. Louisa, the middle child, is unremarkable beyond an intermittent lisp; on a laptop in a childhood treehouse she has developed a relationship with someone called ‘yourstruly’, who mentions the ‘72 Virgins’ Hadith and asks whether she has access to aluminium and potassium perchlorate. The eldest sister, Abigail, is ‘unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera’. After a relationship with an adjunct art teacher working at Sacred Daughters High, her latest boyfriend is someone called War Crimes Wes, an ex-mercenary with Crohn's Disease who works in private security for the neighbourhood’s billionaire, Paul Alabaster.
Beyond Roman Catholicism, Alabaster’s shipping corporation is the unnamed West Coast town’s only notable source of employment. The Flynn sisters’ parents, Catherine and William ‘Bud’ Flynn, were once aspiring artists in what is presumably San Francisco; childrearing and the concomitant desire for a four-bedroom house has led Bud to a middle-management position overseeing databases at Alabaster™. ‘Selling out was better for the babies’, Cash writes, ‘babies loved sheep’. Both have grown dissatisfied; Catherine’s photography practice has for a long time given way to childcare and marijuana. At the time the novel begins, however, she has declared an open marriage, finding in amateur artist and neighbour Jim Doherty ‘the youthful feeling of being understood’.
Lacking the same religious imperatives not to divorce and only dimly marked by financial constraints, Catherine and Bud’s plot is essentially a comedy of remarriage; happiness, as Stanley Cavell puts it, will arrive for them not through the fulfilment of unmet needs but through the examination and transformation of them. In the meantime their distraction allows their children’s respective radicalisation and romance plots to begin. Harper uncovers a surveillance plot inside neighbourhood cedar balls; Louisa auditions for the church’s Inner Beauty Pageant; Abigail starts taking designer drugs with her conspiracy theorist friend Tibet and comes to the attention of Paul Alabaster himself.
Concerns about underperformance at work meanwhile lead Bud to Lost Lambs, a Christian guidance meeting group. They meet twice a week. Activities include hymn singing and creative writing tasks that turn into wish-fulfilment exercises: ‘Can I give the me character millions of dollars?’ asks a teenager; ‘Can I make it so my people do not feel pain the way we do?’ asks a woman with a skin pigmentation problem. The group is led by Miss Winkle, a sort of Catholic American equivalent of what Barbara Pym once called the ‘excellent women’ of 20th century Anglicanism: she is overweight and husbandless and vaguely maligned by the male priest for whom she semi-incidentally dedicates much of her life. She has also been left to raise her disabled daughter alone.
The prose is serene and infinitely swallowable, and Cash’s command of free-indirect is able to naturalise the more ludic and extreme aspects of the Alabaster plot, which dominates the novel’s second half. Bud’s affair with Miss Winkle makes him want to be better; he begins to pay attention to the redactions and discrepancies in the spreadsheets that he is supposed to oversee. Via Abigail, Tibet and War Crimes Wes have independently begun their own investigations into Paul Alabaster; we learn of online rumours about his interest in parabiosis, a ‘human portmanteau [. . .] binding “the old and the young through shared blood.’ In assured plotting if blunt characterisation, all the Flynn children end up at one of Alabaster’s masked parties, where cocktails are made from blood and reptile embryos, and a painting of a crying child hangs on the mansion wall.
Cash’s first book, Earth Angel (2023), was a collection of short stories populated by young unhappy women on social media, squirrel killers and advertising agencies seeking commissions from the Islamic State. Its contents, in other words, is most legible to New Yorkers with a marketable literary interest in abjection and their own bad behaviour and who live, like the narrator of ‘Jester’s Privilege’, ‘in ethnic diasporas out of financial necessity’. Lost Lambs instead feels like a kind of Rorschach blot in which any number of trends in corporate literary fiction might be pieced out. Catherine’s ‘non-ethical non-monogamy’ arc resembles a deflated version of the kind of marital-crisis-as-art-project plot popularised in works like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Miranda July’s All Fours; the novel’s intergenerational focus resembles the work of Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen.
At the same time, Cash’s prose has the ludic, simulated air of the maximalist or ‘systems’ novel; in the character of Bud, in particular, there are affinities with the helpless middle aged men who populate the novels of Don DeLillo’s mid-career. Emphasis on nicknames and recombination of well-worn fictional pre-sets strips the writing of geographical and historic contingency or excess; the distinctiveness of the novel’s world is driven by the wit and assembly of its inventor.
The result is a feeling of sanguine amorphousness, and it is a good tonal equivalent, I think, for the novel’s ultimate worldview. The Alabaster plot is cast off promptly, legally (thus realistically) unresolved. Closure that might have been offered by Catherine and Bud’s remarriage gives way to the more congregational, bucolic form of the blended family. They sit down to celebrate Harper’s 13th birthday at a fast-casual restaurant called Lucky Penne; ‘Grace’, a minor character declares over plates of egg rolls and curry, ‘transcends denominations’. The circumstances are still infinite; feeling good, in the end, is good enough.
Its world is unwholesome and Roman Catholic, like a Henry Darger landscape. All Cash’s proper nouns are fictional, giving it the vague air of fantasy; every hard ‘n’ in the text has been replaced with ‘gn’ on account of a persistent gnat infestation at Our Lady of Suffering, the neighbourhood church, Our Lady of Suffering. Recalling Darger’s Vivian Sisters in The Realms of the Unreal — a group of human-looking aliens fighting to free a group of woodland planets from child exploitation — the novel’s nominal centre is a group of morbidly precocious teenage girls. (It is always ‘girls’, not ‘children’). Harper Flynn is 13 and can speak six languages and hack into her father’s work computer; she is aware, like Cash, that ‘all complex female characters needed conflict and adversity’. Louisa, the middle child, is unremarkable beyond an intermittent lisp; on a laptop in a childhood treehouse she has developed a relationship with someone called ‘yourstruly’, who mentions the ‘72 Virgins’ Hadith and asks whether she has access to aluminium and potassium perchlorate. The eldest sister, Abigail, is ‘unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera’. After a relationship with an adjunct art teacher working at Sacred Daughters High, her latest boyfriend is someone called War Crimes Wes, an ex-mercenary with Crohn's Disease who works in private security for the neighbourhood’s billionaire, Paul Alabaster.
Beyond Roman Catholicism, Alabaster’s shipping corporation is the unnamed West Coast town’s only notable source of employment. The Flynn sisters’ parents, Catherine and William ‘Bud’ Flynn, were once aspiring artists in what is presumably San Francisco; childrearing and the concomitant desire for a four-bedroom house has led Bud to a middle-management position overseeing databases at Alabaster™. ‘Selling out was better for the babies’, Cash writes, ‘babies loved sheep’. Both have grown dissatisfied; Catherine’s photography practice has for a long time given way to childcare and marijuana. At the time the novel begins, however, she has declared an open marriage, finding in amateur artist and neighbour Jim Doherty ‘the youthful feeling of being understood’.
Lacking the same religious imperatives not to divorce and only dimly marked by financial constraints, Catherine and Bud’s plot is essentially a comedy of remarriage; happiness, as Stanley Cavell puts it, will arrive for them not through the fulfilment of unmet needs but through the examination and transformation of them. In the meantime their distraction allows their children’s respective radicalisation and romance plots to begin. Harper uncovers a surveillance plot inside neighbourhood cedar balls; Louisa auditions for the church’s Inner Beauty Pageant; Abigail starts taking designer drugs with her conspiracy theorist friend Tibet and comes to the attention of Paul Alabaster himself.
Concerns about underperformance at work meanwhile lead Bud to Lost Lambs, a Christian guidance meeting group. They meet twice a week. Activities include hymn singing and creative writing tasks that turn into wish-fulfilment exercises: ‘Can I give the me character millions of dollars?’ asks a teenager; ‘Can I make it so my people do not feel pain the way we do?’ asks a woman with a skin pigmentation problem. The group is led by Miss Winkle, a sort of Catholic American equivalent of what Barbara Pym once called the ‘excellent women’ of 20th century Anglicanism: she is overweight and husbandless and vaguely maligned by the male priest for whom she semi-incidentally dedicates much of her life. She has also been left to raise her disabled daughter alone.
The prose is serene and infinitely swallowable, and Cash’s command of free-indirect is able to naturalise the more ludic and extreme aspects of the Alabaster plot, which dominates the novel’s second half. Bud’s affair with Miss Winkle makes him want to be better; he begins to pay attention to the redactions and discrepancies in the spreadsheets that he is supposed to oversee. Via Abigail, Tibet and War Crimes Wes have independently begun their own investigations into Paul Alabaster; we learn of online rumours about his interest in parabiosis, a ‘human portmanteau [. . .] binding “the old and the young through shared blood.’ In assured plotting if blunt characterisation, all the Flynn children end up at one of Alabaster’s masked parties, where cocktails are made from blood and reptile embryos, and a painting of a crying child hangs on the mansion wall.
Cash’s first book, Earth Angel (2023), was a collection of short stories populated by young unhappy women on social media, squirrel killers and advertising agencies seeking commissions from the Islamic State. Its contents, in other words, is most legible to New Yorkers with a marketable literary interest in abjection and their own bad behaviour and who live, like the narrator of ‘Jester’s Privilege’, ‘in ethnic diasporas out of financial necessity’. Lost Lambs instead feels like a kind of Rorschach blot in which any number of trends in corporate literary fiction might be pieced out. Catherine’s ‘non-ethical non-monogamy’ arc resembles a deflated version of the kind of marital-crisis-as-art-project plot popularised in works like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Miranda July’s All Fours; the novel’s intergenerational focus resembles the work of Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen.
At the same time, Cash’s prose has the ludic, simulated air of the maximalist or ‘systems’ novel; in the character of Bud, in particular, there are affinities with the helpless middle aged men who populate the novels of Don DeLillo’s mid-career. Emphasis on nicknames and recombination of well-worn fictional pre-sets strips the writing of geographical and historic contingency or excess; the distinctiveness of the novel’s world is driven by the wit and assembly of its inventor.
The result is a feeling of sanguine amorphousness, and it is a good tonal equivalent, I think, for the novel’s ultimate worldview. The Alabaster plot is cast off promptly, legally (thus realistically) unresolved. Closure that might have been offered by Catherine and Bud’s remarriage gives way to the more congregational, bucolic form of the blended family. They sit down to celebrate Harper’s 13th birthday at a fast-casual restaurant called Lucky Penne; ‘Grace’, a minor character declares over plates of egg rolls and curry, ‘transcends denominations’. The circumstances are still infinite; feeling good, in the end, is good enough.