There’s been a lot of hype about Meline Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a darkly comic, dysfunctional family saga set in a lightly surreal version of contemporary America.
The novel opens with a priest in a small US town trying to deal with a gnat infestation in his church after a local woman donates a plant that turns out to be full of gnat eggs. “It was Miss Winkle’s fault, she had brought the gnats and this was unforgivable, not in the eyes of God but those of Father Andrew …”
From there, the story turns to the deeply chaotic Flynn family as their lives spiral in absurd directions. Catherine and Bud’s relationship is clearly collapsing and may or may not end in separation or divorce. Their marriage made passionate sense when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. Since then, life has lost its glamour and gained three daughters, a suburban house and a lot of Tupperware.
Catherine is drawn to Jim, an amateur artist who offers her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He revives her artistic ambitions, prompting her to cover the Flynn home with nude self-portraits and announce that she wants an open marriage. What she doesn’t yet know is that Jim keeps a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement — “each of these pussies has touched my life”.
The three daughters, meanwhile, drift into strange and perhaps dangerous territory. Abigail is smart, beautiful and dating an older veteran known as War Crimes Wes, which tells you quite a lot about the kind of novel this is. Louise is looking for connection and purpose, which leads her online towards extremist ideology. Harper is a renegade, precocious child genius, paranoid that the town is hiding something from her.
What begins as domestic turmoil slowly becomes something bigger, and the novel starts to slide into a conspiracy involving Paul Alabaster, a billionaire who built the docks that made the town what it is. But he is a very, very shady man. If you’ve seen Eyes Wide Shut and know that final sequence in the big mansion, he’s that kind of guy.
The book has that arch, iconoclastic humour of a Family Guy episode. It reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums, where all the children are talented and flawed in strange, specific ways. The characters are larger than life, but through this almost caricature-like setup, the book manages to talk about everyday struggles that are hard to talk about. They are so exaggerated that they sometimes come all the way back round to being realistic, convincing human beings.
The comedy works because it’s not just there for its own sake. It gives the book its strange energy and helps carry some of the more serious material. More importantly, it succeeds in the way Cash talks about love, romantic love in particular, and how it can be a salvific force.
Abigail describes it as awful yet also the best thing. Cash understands that love can feel ridiculous, overwhelming, life-saving and humiliating, all in the same breath. She also understands the ways love can spoil, or seem to disappear overnight, especially inside a family where everyone is disappointed or trying to escape themselves.
This gives Lost Lambs the makings of one of those big, sprawling family novels, somewhere between Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, though from a much lighter, more comic perspective.
The plot moves fast. It’s engaging and engrossing, with unexpected things happening all the time. Large sections are carried almost entirely through dialogue, and the dialogue is brilliantly witty and sharp. The satire of contemporary culture is well balanced and finely tuned, and the conspiracy subplot adds momentum to a story that already has plenty going on.
In the second half, Lost Lambs takes on the atmosphere of a sinister thriller-horror novel, which is unexpected but convincing. You can feel something terrible moving towards these characters and, by then, you care about them enough to want to rush forward and make sure they are all right.
Ultimately, Lost Lambs is a tender, hilarious novel and a vignette of a beautiful little world. Its picture of humdrum suburban America is charming and nightmarish in equal parts, as I assume those places must be. The villain is compelling, grotesque and devilish, the type you love to hate.
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