A Début Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth

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.”