Lost Lambs review by Madeleine Cash – A smart comedy for our conspiracy theory age | imaginary

MAchieving the success of a comic novel is a rich and difficult undertaking in our desperate, and sometimes strangely apocalyptic, age. Madeleine Cash notes that the combination of tenderness and irony may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her first novel about the Flynn family, is a smart, rapid-fire book set in a small American town, drunk with clever, garbled lists and typographically infested by the mosquitoes that plague the local church the family attends (“Explanation,” “Annihilation”).

The Flynn’s are a mess. It was easy for Katherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve had three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine yields to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood.” He revives her artistic ambitions, leading her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and an open marriage declaration. She doesn’t know yet that Jim has a collection of clay vaginas in his basement (“Every one of these pussies influenced my life”).

Harper, 13, is a child prodigy who taught herself six languages ​​but is “legendarily bored” and regularly suspended from school. Louise suffers from the “plight of the middle child” stuck “in the prison of her worldliness.” She is offered an escape through a cyberpunk who advises her to invest in explosive-making equipment. Finally, there’s Abigail, the 17-year-old beauty of the family. Her mother warns that too much makeup tells men they are only interested in one thing. “Good,” Abigail replies. “It saves me the trouble of telling them myself.” Its latest conquest is War Crimes Wes, a former soldier who now works in private security for Paul Alabaster, the city’s megalomaniacal billionaire shipping tycoon, who also employs Bud on his accounts team.

So, here they are, ready to go, in need of a plot – and it turns out that Cash is a master of planning, an art that is often underestimated. It is provided by a combination of church and commerce. Between them, Paul Alabaster and God vie for Flynn’s souls, with God mediated by Miss Winkle, a local philanthropist who runs the “Lost Lambs” support group to which Bud is sent when he feels too depressed to function at work. One night, a drunk Bud clumsily kisses her as tea spills from their cups and they immediately have “wholesome, exciting” sex which turns out to be just what Bud needs, more so than sex with his hot but unsatisfied wife. Bud is now trying, in the clumsy but ultimately noble way of a comedic hero, to be a better person, and this brings him into conflict with Paul Alabaster.

For ages, Harper – bored enough to browse Alabaster accounts on the family computer – has been telling Bud that there’s a shipping container delivered every year that isn’t properly accounted for in his spreadsheets. Now that Bud is trying to be his best for Miss Winkle, he asks Alabaster some tough questions. Meanwhile, Wes is also investigating war crimes with Alabaster, concerned that Abigail has been profiled as the only woman to receive an invitation to his next high-security party. Abigail’s best friend, Tibet, a conspiracy theory junkie, has been drawn into speculation that Alabaster’s yearning for eternal youth has led him to suck vampire blood. Naturally, all of this will cluster around the party itself; Of course, it turns out that the conspiracy theorists were right all along; Of course the sisters will find that they are more loyal and brotherly than they feared.

The book’s priestesses are Miss Winkle and Tibet. Ms. Winkle presents an interestingly unfashionable vision of goodness. “Do you want to be right Or do you want to be happy?” asks Bud Harper at the beginning of the book. Then he chooses happiness; in the end, Miss Winkle reveals that there is no happiness without what is right, and everyone in her increasingly extended family learns that as well. This goodness is complemented by the new kinds of truth in Tibet. She is convinced that if each of us experiences “only a small part of reality,” we must come up with new paradigms of combined knowledge. This leads in her case to a bizarre validation of online conspiracy theories, but the novel itself offers its own vision of collective truth.

Cash’s witty wit allows her to warm hearts while poking fun at the world. Sometimes the plot takes up a great deal of the novel’s atmosphere; Printed mosquitoes might be a bit cute (does that even have to be “attractive”?); But in an age when conspiracy theorists are turning out to be both disturbingly right and disturbingly wrong, and where tenderness and old-fashioned laughter are more in demand than ever, Cash is a happy, buoyant new voice.

Lara Vigel is the author of Nursery: 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 from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.