Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

One of the best lines in one of the best books I read last year is, ‘If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.’ That’s not from Lost Lambs but Madeline Cash’s debut is another book that makes me happy it exists because the more novels that bring irreverence and style and wit and honesty to a public needing to be told now more than ever that the cult of the individual helps nobody except those who care the least about individual human beings, and that we can only find fulfilment and real identity by realising and embracing the fact that we are always part of something greater than ourselves, the better.

The Flynn family is dysfunctional. The mother, Catherine, persuades Bud, the father, to open their marriage because she fancies a fling with a neighbour who turns out to spend his time making misshapen ceramic vaginas. Bud sleeps in his minivan and contemplates suicide. They have three daughters: Abigail, the hottest girl in town, has recently acquired a boyfriend with the sobriquet War Crimes Wes, and dreams of a life of wealth and glamour. Louise, the overlooked middle child, finds purpose through falling in love with an Islamic terrorist online and building a bomb to take out a beauty pageant that didn’t accept her talent for holding her breath so long she passes out as a valid entry criterion.

Harper, now one of my favourite literary characters and one for whose series of spin-off novels I will yearn with little hope of satisfaction, is a kind of 21st century Matilda. ‘[I]ncredibly, painfully, mythically bored’ by the limited life of a 12-year-old schoolgirl, Harper has little choice other than to learn seven languages, slash the priest’s tyres, teach deaf kids to play blackjack, and, naturally, uncover a dark conspiracy run by the local billionaire which ends up involving her entire family in a high stakes game of blood cults and human trafficking.

And yet, at the end of all this, the Flynns – with some reconfiguration and expansion – are happy, and their ‘joy and communion transcended the Flynns’ obvious domestic flaws like grace transcended denomination’. Their warmth radiates beyond themselves to other characters and to the reader fortunate enough to be bearing witness to it.

Lost Lambs is short in length but long in achievement. Tremendously funny and madcap and rapid-fire and also tender and uplifting. The power of looking askance to see the world more clearly is the power that can make comedy the most significant of artistic genres. Cash has that power, and it’s what makes me believe that everything she will write will be worth reading, whether or not it manages to be quite as lambent as her first effort. In a recent interview, Cash states that she’s ‘excited to write another one’. Me too, Madeline.