LOST LAMBS, by Madeline Cash
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Three authors walk into a British pub — let’s call it Olive or Twist. The first orders a frozen margarita with salt and says, “Just a Pynchon the rim.” The bartender, affronted, barks, “Get out, write now!” Deflated, the author points to the others and whines, “But you let all of my Franzen!”
If the needle on your pun-o-meter is pointing more toward “chuckle” than “groan,” you’re in luck: The first of those bon mots is one of many from Madeline Cash’s madcap debut novel, “Lost Lambs.” A martini bar in Pittsburgh beat her to it, but to Cash’s credit, the ice cream parlor Anne Frank’s Dairy and a “mobile bris service” called Take an Inch, Give a Mohel each appear to be one of a kind.
Word-playful businesses pepper the company town occupied by the Flynns, who are a family in crises. Bud Flynn, long after giving up on a life in punk rock, pays his three daughters’ way through Catholic school by managing accounts and systems at “Alabaster Harbor
,” the “primary port for the entire western coastline,” and he’s ready to “drive the minivan into the sea.” His wife, Catherine, insists that they open their ossifying marriage, hence Bud’s maudlin urge. And her recent penchant for hanging nude self-portraits, taken at their divorced neighbor’s encouragement, isn’t helping matters.
When she isn’t daydreaming of dangerous liaisons, Catherine wrestles with regret over abandoning her own artistic ambitions for family life, reckons with middle age via intricate skin care routines and puffs on a joint in her oatmeal bath. Bud sleeps in the minivan, masturbates into tea towels and loses focus enough at his job to be remanded to the book’s eponymous “Christian guidance” program. Neither remembers to stock the fridge, leaving the children to fend for themselves.
Ah, the children. At 17, Abigail is the town beauty, sharp but more moved to apply makeup than herself. Finally recovered from an ill-fated love affair with her art teacher, she falls for a man called War Crimes Wes, an I.B.S.-afflicted former soldier working security for the reclusive billionaire who owns the harbor. Louise, 15, dreams of winning Our Lady of Suffering’s Spring Inner Beauty Pageant and is “experimenting with Islamic fundamentalism” after meeting her online boyfriend in a chat room for middle children.
Harper, 12, is a “troublemaker with no origin myth.” Bored stiff at school, she teaches herself half a dozen languages and starts reading her father’s emails, which convince her that someone at his workplace is hiding a terrible secret from the town. Spot-on in her suspicions, she’s the brightest of the bunch. Still, all three daughters are preternaturally precocious, and, like their parents, creatures of relentless repartee — call them the not-so-royal Tenenbaums.
The Flynns’ various troubles keep them on separate but intersecting paths as neighboring oddballs wander across them: the sweetly self-serious church lady with her cognitively impaired child, the cynical priest who majored in French cinema and the sinister, “Eyes Wide Shut”-coded caricature of a maritime tech billionaire. The last quietly underpins a story that is part quirky crime caper, part manic cultural satire and part affectionate dramedy of family both biological and found.
Cash, a co-founder of the modish downtown Manhattan literary magazine Forever, could reasonably be accused of being just what she suggests of Harper: “too clever for her own good.” Take the “gnat situation” in the Flynn family’s church, which she subsequently employs as a literary device. Errant g’s infest the text itself until the actual gnats are “elimignated” midway through.
The book’s surely bedeviled copy editors generally manage to sustain this distracting gag. But the grace that saves “Lost Lambs” from overly committing to the bit is Cash’s evident fondness for its beleaguered eccentrics. The extermination sequence, for instance, is among the most moving this zany novel has to offer. Gnaturally.
LOST LAMBS | By Madeline Cash | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 336 pp. | $28
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