Madeline Cash has had many infestations in her life. On a recent day in London, she let in a bearded exterminator to spray her apartment for moths. Like her debut novel, “Lost Lambs,” her flat had been overtaken by pesky flying bugs.
“The first step is admitting you have a problem,” Cash said, flashing the perforated hemline of her skirt.
In her off-kilter book from this winter, about a lovable, oddball family, it is not only the local church that is infested by gnats. The bugs travel onto the page, infesting the spelling of the words: extermignate, gnaturally, desitgnation. It’s one of many gags in her jester grimoire.
“I wanted to do the opposite of diaristic autofiction,” she said. “I wanted to do something maximalist.”
Cash, a 30-year-old writer who grew up in California, had come to London to be with her boyfriend, a filmmaker who is studying at Central Saint Martins. The move had taken her out of New York, where she was part of the literary circle that had started gathering in and around Chinatown during the pandemic around publications like The Drunken Canal, Heavy Traffic and Forever, which Cash had founded with two friends.
A crop of fiction has sprouted from this downtown milieu over the last two years, including “My First Book” by Honor Levy, “Flat Earth” by Anika Jade Levy, and “Paradise Logic” by Sophie Kemp. What sets this cohort apart is a generational affect that values artifice over nature, theatricality over authenticity, candy vapes over natural wine.
“We were told that we could never buy property and that the climate was going to destroy us,” Cash said. “What else can we do but make art about it? So we got drunk and put on costumes and threw parties and published ridiculous stories and didn’t think about censorship.”
The essayist and critic Sam Kriss sees some promise in the movement. “I don’t know if I could point to any contemporary literary movements that are coming up with anything vastly better,” he said. “I’d love it if they’d all found something to write about other than themselves, though — that would be very encouraging.”
A frequent criticism of the scene is summed up by a comment beneath a recent essay about the larger Dimes Square milieu: “Perhaps unique among scenes in that it produced no meaningful art.”
“Lost Lambs” would seem to suggest otherwise. Called “the first internet novel with broad appeal,” it has been sold to 21 countries since it came out in January. The art-house studio A24 has acquired the book for a limited series.
“To me, Chinatown is like the Algonquin Round Table,” Cash said. “This is where the best minds of my generation are. And people love to hate from outside the club.”
She led the exterminator to the study. On a desk, “The 12 Step Prayer Book” was stacked on top of a copy of “Infinite Jest” adorned with Hello Kitty stickers.
The pest controller scribbled an insecticide note as he prepared to spray the flat. “Should be all right to head back in about two days.” Cash took a frantic look around the room.
“Everything will work out as it should,” she said. “God never sends mail to the wrong address.”
Moth Exile
Temporarily cast out of her apartment, Cash’s first stop in her moth exile was the local pub. Eyeing a sign reading “NO CHILDREN AFTER 7 P.M.,” she suggested we take our drinks outside. “I may want to um, chain-smoke, which I shouldn’t do tonight in the hotel,” she said.
Cash, who grew up in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles sipped from a pint of Coke. She was wearing white socks, black ballet flats and a black woolen cardigan. A gold crucifix hung around her neck. It belonged to her grandmother, a Croatian immigrant on her father’s side.
“She was the only one in that family who was nice to me,” she said.
For “Lost Lambs,” Cash drew from her upbringing. Her mother is an actress who became a hospice nurse when her Hollywood jobs dried up. Her estranged father, she said, is a “very conservative Navy guy” who lives in San Pedro, a Los Angeles neighborhood not unlike the unnamed port town where her book is set.
“I have the classic ‘dad-took-off-on-me’ story,’” she said, lighting a cigarette. “He had a kind of replacement family on an insane property I would sometimes visit on the weekends. He had a pet peacock in a sun room.”
Cash’s characters go to comedic extremes to find connection outside the shaky family unit. One daughter joins a terrorist cell; a second dates a war veteran who goes by War Crimes Wes; a third tumbles down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Religion emerges as a big theme. There’s a cinephile priest, a promiscuous church lady and a dubious support group at the local parish.
“When all this new Catholicism came around, that was very fascinating to me,” Cash said, referring to a mini wave of conversion among the downtown set in New York. “All these kids who had grown up with parents that rejected orthodoxy were now returning to it, like, needing something. And it wasn’t necessarily the teachings of the Catholic church, but just community.”
She shared some of that yearning. In Los Angeles during the pandemic, Cash was struggling to get her career started. She had interned for The Onion and “Conan,” but was considering giving up on comedy.
In search of something more stimulating, Cash set out to organize a reading at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where she had worked as a teenager.
The reading brought her back in touch with her high-school best friend, the writer Anika Jade Levy, who helped organize the event. They read each other’s work and traded takes on the writing that had emerged in the 2010s. In their view, none of it seemed to capture the chaos and dysfunction that had come to define the Covid era. They also kept an eye on the literary scene — and sensibility — that was emerging on the opposite coast.
“I think I idealized downtown because a lot of the Tyrant Books writers that I admired orbited around Chinatown,” she said, referring to the independent publisher in New York. She rattled off some names: Atticus Lish, Jordan Castro, Honor Levy. “I thought they were doing something transgressive and new and interesting, and I literally just moved there with a suitcase.”
For Cash, an absurdist world needs absurdist remedies. “I think it’s easier to hold a mirror up to society if it’s a fun house mirror — if it’s distorted and a little bit hyperbolic,” she said.
In 2022, Cash and Levy, along with the art director Natalia Ruiz, founded Forever, a magazine that embraced “the low quality aesthetic of the early digital age,” publishing deliberately glib, rough-edged fiction out of touch with mainstream literature.
Cash said they were trying to meet a “cultural need” for something more playful in literary culture. Levy described their publication as “a place for writing that isn’t stuffy and professionalized and institutional.”
At literary parties, the two could be spotted roaming the room in twin princess dresses, their pastel ruffles standing out among the scrum of pullovers and Oxford shirts.
“We would say the most ridiculous things,” Cash said. “I told one reporter that I was an orphan. Everything was just a play to us.”
The End of Fantasy
On the day after the exterminator’s visit, I met Cash at the Zetter Hotel, where she was waiting out the moth exterminators with her boyfriend, Chris Comfort, a filmmaker. She was dressed in a white dressing gown, eating a cheeseburger on the canopy bed with a friend, Marina Scholz.
Cash reflected on the two years she spent working on “Lost Lambs.” She spoke of visits to the emergency room and cocaine on mirrored trays and nights blacked out on park benches. The theatrics got to a point where Comfort decided to end their relationship.
“I was just slowly and systematically losing everything. I could see it slipping away, into this calamity that is all my own making,” she said.
In New York, Cash decided to stop editing Forever and take a break from the scene. She sensed it was her only chance to win back her boyfriend.
She said she volunteered at a women’s shelter and brought 12 Step meetings to the prison in Chinatown. She got sober, got back together with Comfort and set to work on a second novel about “an autistic man who is constructing a giant carousel.”
In the London hotel room, Cash sat down by the wardrobe mirror to adjust her makeup. “I’m reading ‘Fear of Flying,’” she said, referring to the Erica Jong novel. “And she says, when you try to seduce the public, you end up feeling like a whore. And it does kind of feel like that.”
Her year of London sobriety has been boring but necessary, she said. In a few weeks, she would be back in New York, back in Chinatown, back in her scene.
“You can’t save your ass and your face at the same time,” she said, smearing blush across her cheek. “So it hasn’t been very glamorous. At some point, the fantasy gives way to reality.”
The post Madeline Cash Isn’t Playing Around. Or Is She? appeared first on New York Times.
