Madeline Cash's 'Lost Lambs' and the race to write "the" contemporary novel

How she is neither Honor nor Anika Jade Levy—and the strange ubiquity of 'Trainspotting' lists

I had Madeline Cash all wrong. Or, rather, a lot of people had Madeline Cash all wrong and I made the mistake of assuming there was any veracity to what these people were saying. Many such cases! You see, the impression I’d received second hand was that Cash was just another 𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓸𝓻 𝓛𝓮𝓿𝔂 homunculus, some Dimes Square it girlie getting by on cheap meme-speak to cover for plainly bad writing while imbibing and promoting crypto-fascist ideas she barely understands, if she even recognizes them as crypto-fascist in the first place. Imagine my shock when, in preparation for this review, I read Cash’s first published book, the short story collection Earth Angel, and found that it was… good? And maybe even evinced a brain inside Cash’s skull that was made up of actual living tissue and not Dasha Nekrasova’s discarded chewing gum like Levy’s?¹ Earth Angel is an extremely funny collection of stories—it has its ups and downs as any debut story collection does, often showing a writer first getting used to standing up on her own two feet, but it actually made me laugh out loud! A lot!

Cash is at her best when she’s writing delirious Barthelme-esque daydreams rather than the more realist mode she dips into. Politically, the book takes great pains to appear as if it was written by someone with at least left of center opinions, probably in part to distance Cash from the stances of some of the contemporaries she’s most frequently lumped in with—not that it seemed to help, because if you read a critic like Grace Byron you would be forgiven for thinking Cash is some groyping goosestepper:

These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values.

Byron ropes Cash in as a reactionary in spite of all of Cash’s best intentions, even going so far as to insinuate that Cash depicting superficial women in her new novel Lost Lambs is some kind of Trad Wife/Bimbo Aesthetic submission thing.

Cash and Levy are more interested in QAnon and Pizzagate as fictional fodder than political phenomena. The ambition of these novels is profundity through referencing politics in passing, never engaging. This is not how critique works. As bell hooks wrote, cynicism is not progressive. The worst thing these protagonists fear is aging, their breasts sagging. They fret over their competitive female friends more than their patriarchal foes.

This is a very weird thing to hear from Grace Byron, the woman who wrote “Art is Not a Bible Lesson.” Like, Grace, come the fuck on. “They fret over their competitive female friends more than their patriarchal foes”? Oh you mean like the majority of women I have ever met? What does Byron want from Cash? The narrator to come down and say “these are problematic behaviours”? The new book is very obviously and openly critical of the behaviours on display, and the fact that Byron, usually a more incisive reader than this, is refusing to see that for what it is can only be the result of willful blindness—the desire to have Cash’s work conform to a foregone thesis about what her work represents in the culture. The truth is that Cash is often even too direct with her critique, such as in this quote, which is only about twelve pages into the book:

Late capitalism did its job of convincing Catherine that she was insufficient, an empty void, and thus needed to slowly fill that void with products that made her face smell like parsley or coconuts.

What more do you want, Grace? A Bible lesson???²

This of course brings me to the subject of that very same new novel, Lost Lambs, the book that it seems like absolutely everyone is talking about, and the book that will likely carry out Cash’s effective coup de tête against Honor Levy to become the Queen of E-Girl Lit. Now, I’ve already mentioned that I thought Cash was at her best when she was in Barthelme mode, but Lambs is clearly Cash in realist mode, and in particular Franzen mode—I suppose I shouldn’t have expected otherwise considering how clearly this is as an attempt at a commercial breakthrough. Cash is still “weird” yes but this is nonetheless a book a hypothetical “general reader” could pick up and subsist on, even if they maybe found the characters “unlikable” in that way that normies and adult baby YA readers are always complaining about. The prose here is approachable, by which I mean it is “not alienating,” and it certainly isn’t the kind of deadpan wallpaper paste I think people have come to expect of writers of Cash’s milieu. Par example, the first paragraph:

The gnat situation in the church was getting out of hand. 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, who was unable to exterminate the gnats, not for lack of trying—he’d employed every trap, spray, and swatter on the modern market—and yet his efforts had little effect on the greater gnat population. If anything, it was growing. Father Andrew imagined that soon the gnats might attract a larger pest—gnat-eating spiders, perhaps—which might attract, say, frogs, which might attract rats, which might attract cats, which might attract coyotes, which might attract a larger coyote-eating mammal, and so on and so forth. It was Miss Winkle’s fault because Miss Winkle had brought the plant into the church, “like God did on the third day!” Miss Winkle attended every church function with her brain-damaged child, who wore gun range earmuffs to mass—the organs startled her—and occasionally Miss Winkle brought plants from the nursery where she volunteered, tending the orchids. Surely she didn’t know that the plant had fungal gnat eggs in its soil, but why bring a plant into a church in the first place? thought Father Andrew. It wasn’t a botanical garden. A monstera plant too, meaning monster in Latin, assumed Father Andrew, although he wasn’t sure, hadn’t studied Latin at the seminary, majored instead in French Cinema.

Cash’s novel tells the story of a modern family in tatters from the vicissitudes of internet life and marital stagnation. While the parents are off trying to get dick from their neighbours to spite one another, their daughters are getting wrapped up in conspiracy theories, getting into age gap relationships with potential war criminals, and experimenting with Islamic fundamentalism. Above it all is the billionaire shipping magnate Paul Alabaster, the villain of our story, a somewhat heavy-handed mix of like… Jeff Bezos, David Koch, and Jeffrey Epstein. It is, like Earth Angel, very funny (though not quite as funny) and filled with Big Questions about our modern lives.

While there have been questions about Cash’s implicit politics, many of them as noted somewhat bogus, there’s also been a lot of questions about whether the book has been astroturfed. Writers like the aforementioned Byron (sorry to pick on you so much in this one, Grace, I’m really not such a bad guy when you get to know me) have cried sexism at these allegations, but people like Freddie deBoer make compelling points—none of this is to say that Cash isn’t “talented” or hasn’t “worked hard” or doesn’t “deserve it,” but there is at the very least something that smells a little fishy. I’m a Beastie Boys fanatic, but Mike D’s parents turned out to be the art dealers Harold and Hester Diamond, who literally sold paintings to famous record company executives—“who you know” is the name of the game. On the other hand, I think a good deal of the decision was probably still plain ol’ industry calculus. Novels are a hot commodity these days and the temperature is only turning up, it was about time these publishers started to flaunt it. All this press coverage was absolutely the result of a major campaign on FSG’s part that was probably couched in the expectation that Cash, having cut her teeth as a trendy writer and literary taste-maker through her previous book and her stewardship of Forever Mag, could be a pivotal voice to push with her accessible new novel. For one reason or another, someone important has placed their chips on Cash.

Fellow Forever Mag editor Anika Jade “No Relation” Levy’s Flat Earth is more what I think of when I think of traditional post-alt-lit e-girl lit. Among other things, it features characters who one might recognize as “e-girls,” whereas no one in Lost Lambs is actually an e-girl—a girl who spends too much time online and becomes a convert to fundamentalist Islam, sure, but a call to Mecca does not an e-girl make (that would be the Vatican). Levy’s book wasn’t promoted half as much as her comrade’s, but that’s probably because it resists the broader appeal that Cash’s book had the potential to court—too dark, too joyless, too alienating. (Not that those are bad words to me—those are the vital distinctions that made me prefer DeLillo to Wallace—and there are times when Cash’s book gets way too twee for me, way too “hysterical realist,” way too… McSweeney’s. Thankfully she doesn’t get too bogged down in it, but, y’know… it’s there.)

In the aftermath of the “Death of Woke,” our fiction has gone from “socially conscious” to “existentially anxious.” There is a deep eschatological streak going on and a race to produce something that captures “this moment.” What Cash and Levy share in their respective work is a desire to capture the now, to define our epoch on the page—they are transparently aiming to create work of generational importance, work that can in effect “sum up” our shared experience of this hyperreal post-digital age. At the very least Cash finally ditches a long past-due cliché of this kind of work: The Trainspotting Catalogue. For whatever reason, a lot of writers seem to think that just listing a bunch of contemporary things makes your work immersed in contemporaneity. In Trainspotting it went like this:

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future.

A lot of Gen X writers did this: Coupland comes to mind, and of course Chuck Palahniuk did it a lot. You also find it in a lot of Gen X music, most notably “Fitter Happier” by Radiohead:

Fitter happier / More productive… Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats) / A patient, better driver / A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)… Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall) / Charity standing orders / On Sundays ring road supermarket… [etc.]

The effect in Gen X work is obviously trying to comment on materialism, to capture the feeling of the over-accumulation of sheer “stuff,” and how it all ties to a kind of conformity and domesticity that generation seemed to fear more than hell. If anything, the Zoomers are more enamoured by the notions of conformity and domesticity, but seem to have about as much of a struggle to get into it as the Gen X-ers had to get out of it. The abundance of “things,” meanwhile, makes way for an abundance of “information”—confusing, contradicting, overwhelming, alarming, brain-melting “information.” A lot of contemporary literature opts to adapt the Gen X list with the intent of producing that effect, of demonstrating what it feels like to have your head held down under the data stream while you drown in it. Throughout Anika Jade Levy’s book, there are several of these lists:

We don’t notice that no one is having babies until the economy collapses because there are no children left to buy electronic tablets. A foreign dignitary visits the city and the cops move the homeless encampments into the park. They materialize again later that week under the bridges, another specter to discipline the labor market. No one bothers trying to demystify the coexistence of poverty and decadence. Men just want to amass enough capital to impose their own childhood fantasy upon the world, so they can swipe on dating apps for Disney adults, walk around on Technicolor tennis courts, in terrariums of their own invention. Private arsenals assemble and converge. The girls slaver for their own bed in the bunker. It’s not that these motivations are unromantic. It’s just that some of us can’t handle the beauty of contemporary life. Instead of having children, we retreat to sensory-deprivation tanks, to retinol routines, to rehab centers in the Berkshires. Some of us buy medals of Saint Anthony. We kiss our fathers on the mouth. We teach our mothers how to buy Instagram followers. We take shelter in small consolations. We take the free public bicycles the city has provided for us and deposit them directly into the East River. The girls line themselves up in serviceable rows. We get better at assessing our value. Our touchscreens tell us Syrian peace talks postponed. Our touchscreens tell us Iran is getting active in the Gulf, speedboats encircling navy ships. Our touchscreens tell us that America’s ecologically responsible electronic bicycles are turning up in the South China Sea.

It’s not that I’m so opposed to these on principle—I love lists—it’s just that I’m getting a little tired of seeing these specific lists utilized for these specific purposes in these specific books on these specific subjects. One of the better variations of this attempt that I’ve seen was Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody Is Talking About This, in which most of the story is delivered through a series of delirious Tweet-esque word bombs, very few of which contain references to actual extant internet phenomena, but are instantly recognizable as imbued with the spirit of “what it is to be online.” It’s continuously fresh and at least a bit more interesting than reading something like “incels. gooners. 4chan. fyp. vape. baby shark. left shark. beheading videos on liveleak. blockchain.” Enough! Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth is ironically even about the narrator following a friend around who is making some vacuous experimental film where she goes to all these zones of heavy zeitgeist concentration—such as to conventions of believers in the titular “flat earth”—so as to just sort of itemize it all. I might be willing to see that as a confession on Levy’s part of some of her own book’s problems if Levy didn’t simultaneously seem like she thought the movie she describes, at least in concept, actually sort of sounded good and not purely sophomoric and tiresome. Still, in spite of this, I actually think there are times that I prefer Flat Earth to Lost Lambs of the two—I like it a little more bitter to my taste, and over time the twee-ness of Lost Lambs was turning my stomach more than the flattened e-girl affect of Flat Earth.

Anyways—Cash’s is not a bad book, admirable even, but the social commentary, while not CRYPTO-FASCIST, sometimes felt a little too heavy-handed or trying a bit too hard to hem in the present. More importantly for me, the effort was a bit too sweet for my tastes. I hope that, with the ground broken on her mainstream success, she allows herself to indulge her stranger impulses for her follow-up.

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As an aside, I think Cash is an Aesthetic Catholic, as are the aforementioned Levy and Levy, but at least unlike the Levys Cash isn’t actually Jewish, which to be quite honest puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when they decide to “lol so ironical” adopt a Catholic identity for themselves as an only semi-serious goof, though I suppose one might see it as righteous payback for all the stupid fucking gentiles that decided to get into Kabbalah.³

1. Levy has… “tried” to distance herself from some of these opinions a bit:

Doing things for the sake of being transgressive? I mean, I learned my lesson! I also thought the word ‘reactionary’ just meant you were reacting to things. No, it means right-wing.

2. The main villain’s name is literally “Alabaster.” You know… as in “white”?

3. And, lest we forget, I nearly tried to become a rabbi. Although that had less to do with irony and more to do with amphetamines.