Stop the bleating: I’m not joining the hype over this debut

FICTION
Lost Lambs
Madeline Cash
Doubleday, $34.99

Madeline Cash wants to make you laugh, and she’s been successful, enviably so, to judge by the hype around her debut novel. She’s very fond of puns; 321 pages of them.

Here is some scientific stuff for you: Lost Lambs was found to be “stunning”, “uproarious”, “hilarious”, “shocking”, “ripping” etc by everyone except old lemon lips here. The likers include Lena Dunham, of whom I am fond, and Leslie Jamison, of whom I’m not so fond, and several others of whom I’ve never heard but I expect they will have heard of me.

Lost Lambs is a family saga, so I guess it has to be called a comic novel in these wild comedic days. It is set in the present and everything has to be jokey. And hokey, if possible. Like Bud and Catherine.

Bud and Catherine are the barely midlife parents of three daughters aged about 12, 15, 17, Harper, Louise and Abigail. They all go to school. They all live in a house that no one thinks of cleaning, in a small beachside town in America.

There’s a church, there’s a priest who has slept with 30 women before he found God, and a world-class industrialist who lives in a sort of castle on the hill above the town. His name is Paul Alabaster and his castle is protected by men with guns. Harper is the town genius, Abigail the town beauty and Louise, poor thing, hasn’t space to be anything much, which is why she ends up making bombs in the girls’ treehouse. I guess?

Bud and Catherine married young and neither achieved their youthful promise; he was to be a rock star, she was to be an artist. Bud is the most engaging character in the novel, probably because he is just like his name, the name on his birth certificate. Catherine, relentlessly pre-teen, insists on calling him William and, yes, it does drive him mad.

Their sex life is off, very off, so they’ve come to an arrangement. There’s a man next door whose name I am relieved to have forgotten because he makes vagina vases in a basement (cannot forget that part), in whom Catherine is interested for a while, and Bud seems very pleased to have met a woman called Miss Winkle. Miss Winkle does not have any of Catherine’s physical attributes, but Bud seems charmed. Just shows, doesn’t it! Miss Winkle convenes the church group of needy folk who are known, bleatingly, as the Lost Lambs Christian Guidance. Bud is the latest member. Of course, the entire cast of this novel is a lost lamb.

Bud is an accounts person, mid-level, in the industrialist’s business and he finds a discrepancy. Harper, the child genius who snoops in everyone’s lives, has also noticed it. The discrepancy is the beginning of a mystery. Think Midsomer Murders. But then it turns into horror. In fact, think Tim Burton the entire way through this novel.

Cash says she admires Joseph Heller, Jonathan Franzen, A. M. Homes, but I find no evidence, not one scrap, of any of the above in Lost Lambs. It does scream/screech Tim Burton. Alight here for: fantastical, dark, alienated, surreal, Gothic, horror, monsters, cemeteries.

Cash is an advertising writer, so there are some wonderfully funny and sharp lines and several clever moments. I laughed merrily five times. She would do great stand-up, perhaps? Lost Lambs is aiming for sheer entertainment, obviously, which is why Cash, Ottolenghi-inspired, throws in her entire comedic kitchen.

Her energy is pitiless. Someone will like something. Not this old Lemon Lips. I like my tarts tart and with three ingredients at the most. Could the problem be me, being Australian and not American?

Apart from Bud, who improves during the novel (I cannot write about his behaviour in the opening pages when my heart was sinking instead of the singing I was hoping for), I cared as much about these human caricatures as I do about Tim Burton. Or Season three of anything on Netflix. I should mention that the cover just made me feel very, very schlecht.

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