Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s
Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With Lost Lambs, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

Why I Picked It Up

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Lost Lambs is an interesting study. It was one of the buzziest books of the last year in litfic and New York circles to the extent nearly everyone on Substack had an opinion on it. Critical darling, author decked out in brand campaigns, etc. etc. I wanted to read it for the take aspect too. Why this book? Fabulous to dissect.

About the Book

There was plenty I enjoyed about Lost Lambs:

First of all, I love Madeline Cash's humor. I tend to prefer wry and dry and subtle, and her lines were frequently amusing. Character details could be occasionally hilarious, and that stripe of wit takes a lot of creativity. Amusing is the main word here.

I also appreciated the chapter structure at the start i.e. Lost Lambs had good "edges." At the beginning, each flash into a different character felt almost like a short story. “Good edges” is a quality I relish from all my favorite writers.

Finally, I absolutely adored the "gnat" bit, in that the plot involves the church being infested with gnats—so Madeline Cash infested related words with that n sound with a gn instead. Ex: instead of natural, she'd write gnatural—up until the bugs were exterminated. I love any writer who gets playful with style (Anne Carson, Fran Lebowitz, etc.), especially if there's a plot tie-in i.e. the medium serving the message.

After starting the book, it took me a while to return to it, and that pattern continued throughout the story. I liked it plenty, but didn't feel the strong pull I was expecting to at any point. I solidly liked it. I was never urgent about it, but that's fine.

The characters were funny. The book follows three sisters—Abigail, the pretty one; Harper, the contrarian; Louise, the invisible—and their newly-polyamorous parents. One of them seeks solace from the local priest dealing with the bugs. Another falls in with an extremist boyfriend online. Another dates the security guard of an eccentric billionaire, and is soon invited to a party that may be more sinister than they expect. I loved how Madeline Cash distinguished each of them, even when zany.

The plot itself tied together more at the end, but I admittedly felt my focus drifting through some of the vignettes. I'm a sentence-level writer (and reader) and Cash's drone is witty but started to feel a little too monotone for me to be really hooked. She's sometimes voicey and unafraid to get a wacky, which I loved, but Lost Lambs simultaneously embodies a particularly flattened cool girl affect I associate with a few specific circles.

Funny, but with a lot of the same rhythm sustained over roughly 320 pages. I'm glad I read it and enjoyed the experience, but I had to push myself through it more than I expected. I almost do wonder if I would have loved it more if it committed to being a collection of interconnected short stories, but I also enjoyed it fine as a novel.

The Social Layer of 'Lost Lambs'

There's a secondary layer to this book in that you read it at the surface level to be a dysfunctional family novel, and you can read it on its social level i.e. the role it plays in embodying this particular NYC literary scene of salons and 0.5 camera zoom and Getty Images. (I tried explaining Dimes Square to my sister's boyfriend the other day and did a terrible job.) It's a fascinating scene to observe and analyze.

Lost Lambs got massive media coverage and critical reception, and forced many people—especially frustrated aspiring writers—to peel apart their thoughts on publishing as a social, connective industry. Some of its buzz was how it's always worked, especially in this alt-fic sphere, and some felt lucky or outsized. Plenty of takes seemed bitter, and others picked apart the craft in a way I found intriguing—no matter how they landed.

I love what Lost Lambs forces to the surface about corners of literary fiction: that litfic as a subgenre isn't one you take at face value. If you stripped away the author name, title, imprint, pedigree of each work, the target audience would have vastly different reactions to each line based on what reading that book says about them, and that's why I find the assumptions and aesthetics of litfic particularly engaging to dissect. It's more identity-driven than genre fiction, which makes it fundamentally different. Who gets to shape culture, what “culture” at all is considered the kind of good taste, and whose work is deemed "deeper" than others who might have exactly parallel prose and themes?

As much as I liked Lost Lambs for what it plainly was, its position beyond the text is even more interesting to me as a prism. Was its marketing actually funded by Peter Thiel (and is he Paul Alabaster or is Bryan Johnson?) Do you read the Louise subplot to be alt-right in the way that particular NYC scene can be known for—contrarian? What do you think about the marketing push? etc. It's a book you want to go down a Reddit rabbit hole for. I'm sure those who are more immersed in Dimes Square or r/rsbookclub etc. can articulate its status more eloquently. If those words are gibberish to you, ignore.

I'm not even remotely in that literary scene, but I love the publishing ecosystem and everything surrounding it, so I love to pull apart the niches of literary culture and observe how that ripples into broader circles. Especially occupying a role within journalism—there's a certain aesthetic of magazines, writers, circles that punches above their weight, which is the way culture tends to go. What becomes universal vs. what remains specific to a given social setting?

The book sold a good amount of copies, but didn't necessarily breach containment beyond the media and book club picks; it wasn't an NYT bestseller, but it arguably defined the turn of the year for debuts. I’ve really liked seeing Madeline Cash's coverage across individual publications, brands, etc. and am hopeful about what that might say about—dare I say reclaiming?—the role of writer as a figure, but that veers more into the "lit girl" discourse than I feel like going right now.

Overall Thoughts

I solidly liked Lost Lambs, and its treatment is far beyond a book most people solidly like. And that makes me love being able to read and analyze and discuss it.

I'm glad I liked it, and I loved some risks it took. Others felt very much in line with a blunt irony elevated by particular social groups in book world—which isn't really my vibe voice-wise, but is very in-group/influential in litfic. I'm always curious as an observer here.

Based on the buzz—equal parts fervor and frustration from the literary world depending on levels of access, jealousy, belief in Cash's talent, etc.—I was expecting to feel much stronger about the book either way, or to have visceral opinions about certain creative choices. What you see at the beginning is largely what you get, and I found it enjoyable but maybe not as surprising as I was expecting from the broader cultural response. A little lukewarm personally, but pleasant. I'll read her next, and I like following along.