At a gathering of the Lost Lambs, a Christian guidance club that meets every Monday and Friday at Our Lady of Suffering Church, the facilitator, Miss Priscilla Winkle, announces, “We are going to try something new today”—a writing exercise in which each member of the group is tasked with inventing an imaginary world. One of the attendees is Bud Flynn, the patriarch of the fracturing family at the center of Madeline Cash’s exhilarating comic novel, whose title, “Lost Lambs,” is both a nod to the fictional support group and an accurate description of Cash’s wayward characters. Nearly all of them have complexes about youth: either they dwell on it as they flail through midlife crises or else they are presently ensnared by its many tortures and joys.

By the time the meeting rolls around, nearly halfway into the novel, Miss Winkle is having an affair with Bud, who’s been sleeping for the past month in a minivan. Meanwhile, his perilously insecure wife, Catherine, embarks on a fling with their most insufferable neighbor. All this tumult has added to the unruly behavior exhibited by the three delinquent Flynn daughters, ages twelve, fifteen, and seventeen. The exercise provides a chance for Bud and a few other members of Cash’s struggling flock to sit quietly in a circle, reflect, and create something new.

Cash, a first-time novelist still in her twenties, is also trying something new. The book is set in an unnamed American suburb somewhere on the West Coast which is stripped of actually existing cultural, political, or historical markers. In their place, Cash has substituted a constellation of witty concepts that fall somewhere between a creative branding exercise and a Christopher Guest-like parody of small-town dysfunction. Some schoolgirls compete in Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant, while their more rebellious counterparts are shipped off to Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat for a bit of mandated reformation. Local stores include “a nineteenth-century-themed British pub called Olive or Twist” and a restaurant named Lucky Penne, and many townspeople are fond of a show called “Dad University,” in which a son and his estranged father are assigned as college roommates.

There are whispers in all this of Pynchon’s California surreal, of Doc Sportello, “Inherent Vice” ’s shaggy stoner detective, lighting a joint and tuning into “Godzilligan’s Island” on the All-Nite Freaky Features program. In interviews, Cash has cited the “systems novel” as an influence, and has described “Lost Lambs” as aspiring to be “The Corrections meets Eyes Wide Shut.” The book does feature suburban family malaise, and a masked party where the vibes are off, but its frenetic pace and undisguised artifice are more reminiscent of madcap detective fiction. (In an interview with The Drift, Cash mentioned reading mid-century noirs “to learn how to plot a mystery; alongside “Inherent Vice,” the book brought to mind the wonderfully zany West Coast detective novels of Ross MacDonald.) Cash’s novel, like those of her literary forebears, doesn’t preach, but it does seem determined to convey the fun of formulating one’s own stories, however fanciful, and sharing them with the group.

Each chapter of “Lost Lambs” is told in third person from the perspective of one of the novel’s characters—usually Bud, Catherine, or one of their daughters, who are Cash’s most intriguing creations. The Flynn sisters attend the Sacred Daughters Preparatory School, and lately the town priest has noted their unwillingness to volunteer for church events. Over the course of the novel, each Flynn girl is suspended from school at least once for some screwball infraction, including spreading conspiratorial theories about covert surveillance operations in town, punching another kid in the face, and preparing to commit an act of domestic terrorism. The girls talk back, stay out late, and hold their breath until they pass out. They are the natural enemy of the variously overbearing, irresponsible, deferential, and wicked adults who populate the novel.

Abigail, the eldest, is “unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera,” often lovesick, and dating a former “special contract mercenary” whose nickname is War Crimes Wes. Louise, the one everyone ignores, is not especially anything—except head over heels for her mysterious internet boyfriend, whom she met in a chat room for middle children and who’s awfully well versed in the chemical composition of homemade explosives. But Harper, the youngest, is the most fully and thrillingly realized. She’s brilliant in seemingly all subjects, and has no boundaries (she reads all her siblings’ and parents’ search histories) or respect for authority, but, in the tradition of many a precocious fictional child before her, comports herself with an apparent sophistication well beyond her years.

Cash is adept at playing around with figures we’ve seen before: the corrupt priest, the depressed dad, the pill-popping bestie. Like the other characters in the book, Harper is a stock figure, the brainiac child, but her fearlessness in the face of a crumbling, dishonest world reinvigorates the type. Toward the beginning of the novel, she correctly sniffs out a trafficking plot perpetrated by the company that runs the private port her dad works at (though her concerns are initially ignored). The company is run by an evil tech billionaire, Paul Alabaster, whose greedy tech-billionaire antics (drinking the blood of young Eastern European women in the hopes of staving off old age) represent the extreme end of the spectrum for adults freaking out over their faded youth, and provide acceptable B-plot material, playing backup to the Flynn family breakdown.

Cash’s first book, a short-story collection called “Earth Angel,” was published by the indie press CLASH Books in 2023. (She also co-founded and, until recently, edited the alt-lit journal Forever Magazine.) Most of its seventeen stories feature young female protagonists caught somewhere between attending high school and turning thirty. One dates a guy who likes to kill squirrels; another meets a creepy older man who admires the outfit she wears to school. (“You like [BAND]?” he asked me. I looked down at my shirt and said, “yeah” and he said, “fuck yeah.”) There are deadening moments when Cash doesn’t lift a finger to transform the numbed-out terrors of doomscrolling: “I’m twenty-four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall.” But Cash’s most original and engaging writing is slightly out of step with reality and bleakly funny, devoted to wordplay and willing to be foolish about it. “The office is purgatory and I’m doing limbo in limbo,” says the narrator of the story “TGIF,” an assistant who’s terrible at her job. “How low can I go?”

Cash paints the alternate world of “Lost Lambs” in vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit. Describing the wilderness retreat for troubled girls which Harper attends, Cash writes, “One by one the girls grew tired and docile, their spirits broken. Their nose rings healed. They learned to fish.” The shell of the story is predictable, synthetic, but this means that you can play with it a lot before it breaks. Each member of the Flynn family is given demons to fight, and each has their own farcical plotline that leads them through crisis to a relatively happy outcome. Everyone’s metaphorical nose ring heals. The case is cracked, but justice was never the point. The point was to create the conditions for a bunch of weirdos to sit around and ask questions of one another.

Cash’s dialogue is the novel’s greatest trick. It’s blunt, even a little wooden, yet she wields it with a quicksilver touch, creating volleys of unblinking banter that read like a mashup of a twisted after-school special with the existential musings of a Hal Hartley film: sometimes brutal, sometimes winning, and—like the paddle bearing the insignia “Holy Sisters’ Paddleball Champion” that hangs on the wall of Mother Superior’s office at the girls’ school and is rumored to be used for beatings—not just for show. Take the scene in which Father Andrew, the town priest, reluctantly helps Louise sign up for the Inner Beauty Pageant. He asks for her name, age, height, religious affiliation, biography, and dream. “I have this one where I’m on fire, burning alive from self-immolation right in the middle of English class,” replies Louise, “and everyone just keeps going about their business, not paying attention to me, no one stops, they just keep doing their worksheets while I’m burning.” Father Andrew responds, “Sorry, more like your aspirations for the future.” “Oh! To win the Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant.”

For all the dialogue’s sharpness, a few narrative strands are left too loose or frayed. As with the acceptable but underwhelming billionaire B plot, the book doesn’t always seem to know quite how seriously to take itself. One moment, Paul Alabaster is threatening the Flynn family’s livelihood, and even the physical safety of the Flynn daughters; the next he’s a harmless chew toy, speaking to Bud in banalities: “The truth is funny! You must try navigating harsh realities with humor.” Yet what scans as authorial laxity here is elsewhere integral to the novel’s charm. Though “Lost Lambs” spotlights the perspectives of adults and children alike, its essential narrative voice is that of a wry, well-loved child who can observe the world on her own terms, and has not yet been too seriously knocked back by it. Channelling this voice allows for the sort of gutsy, big-hearted romp that’s unusual even for a first-time novelist. (The more of them I read, the more it seems that all caustically cynical débuts are alike.) Money, power, and corruption are miniaturized to the same scale as talent contests, school uniforms, and young love, suggesting that Cash’s comic chops tend toward absurdity rather than satire. As Harper sneaks into the Alabaster Manor with the hopes of foiling the tech billionaire’s diabolical plot, she still finds a moment to perform a card trick and deliver a well-timed punch line. The novel’s more sophisticated critiques aren’t of unbridled corporate greed or the über-wealthy, but of ordinary people who have lost the ability to reimagine their lives, stuck as they are in bad marriages, pointless jobs, and crippling regret.

Inside the Flynn family domain, the distinction between responsible adult and dependent child has come undone. The pantry is bare and the house is in shambles. “Clothing was discarded, piled, and abandoned: school uniforms—saddle shoes, pleated skirts, pinafores, cardigans—mouth guards, berets, soccer cleats, kerchiefs from summer camps, and capes from school plays.” The kids are growing up fast, and their mother, Catherine, is trying to recapture her lost youth. She’d only recently completed her undergraduate photography studies when she met Bud, who was in a rock band. The couple settled down almost immediately and started their family, abandoning their artistic pursuits. “Selling out was better for the babies,” Cash writes. “Babies loved sheep.” But at the start of the novel, nearly two decades into Catherine and Bud’s marriage, her old urges surface again in the form of manic delusion, and she starts hanging scantily clothed portraits of herself around the already cluttered house. The Flynns’ pompous neighbor, Jim Doherty, a divorcé with a withdrawn, unpleasant son, encourages Catherine’s artistic rebirth. He’s a creative hack himself, but guarded about it. (He keeps his opus, a series of ceramic vaginas, squirrelled away in his basement.) Catherine is tender, batty, and susceptible to flattery, all qualities that make her fall for Jim, even though he’s got a yard sign that says “An Honor Student Lives Here.”

At the other end of the self-expression spectrum is Harper, who has only ever honored her insatiable appetite for knowledge. Her enthusiasm for connection and her earnest (but never self-congratulatory) search for truth seem to seep into the foundations of the novel, which is ultimately a hopeful tale of family transformation. Harper is bored at school, so Bud suggests that she teach herself Latin. “Soon she could write real Latin in pig Latin, which she scrawled liberally on the kitchen wallpaper.” Then Harper learns enough Russian to acquire an endangered glowworm from some people she meets in a Russian horticultural chat room. “She studied at night by the light of her glowworm,” Cash writes, “Language barriers were a problem that needed solving. Then Harper had a thought: What if everything was a language? The world opened up. Music, computers, electrical currents, braiding—the lingua franca of hair, the phonics of string—it was all just a matter of communication.”

This passage is a wonderful encapsulation of childhood curiosity, the rush that comes with discovering clues to existence everywhere around you, invisible sources in the air. It could also be a description of writing fiction, at least the sort on display in “Lost Lambs,” in which stock characters are seen askew and reënchanted. With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it. ♦