How Cash became year’s brightest literary star

The word about town is that Madeline Cash has written the debut of the year. In the weeks since the American writer published her novel Lost Lambs at 29, she has been at the centre of rave reviews: The New Yorker praised her “vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit” while The Times compared the book’s madcap plot, which folds marital problems and suburban girlhood in with terrorist plots and corporate malfeasance, to an episode of The Simpsons.

“It’s been overwhelming,” says Cash one sunny afternoon in London. “I’m a very private person and suddenly my name is in the newspaper.” It’s a precarious position she finds herself in: being a hyped author is thrilling but perilous. It is a vulnerable place to be, the spotlight on full blast and a target on your back. It helps, though, that her book is actually very good — a witty take on the age-old subject of American dysfunction that thrums with charm and originality.

Take her choice to forego all proper nouns: her book is instead set in an unnamed suburb unmoored by geography or history. The effect is dream-like, fuzzy around the edges but specific in its feeling. At its heart, Lost Lambs is the story of a family unit in collapse: parents Bud and Catherine are failing at an open marriage as their daughters deal with the fall-out in their own morbidly funny ways, including at least one terrorist plot — and one vampiric billionaire who siphons blood from beautiful young women in his quest for eternal youth. (That subplot was, in part, loosely inspired by the American entrepreneur Bryan Johnson whose multi-million project to reverse his biological age includes regular blood transfusions with his teenage son.)

If that sounds like a lot all at once, Cash thought so too. “The billionaire thing was actually going to be another book but then I started weaving them together — because I guess if corporate evil runs parallel to our lives anyway, it would make sense that it bumps up against this small town in some capacity.”

That dissonance helps explain the endearing tonal oddities of Cash’s novel. That and the fact that she is not only an avid reader, but a porous one. “Whatever I was reading at the time, the book ended up taking on that tone.” There are shades of The Virgin Suicides in the lush malaise of the girls’ suburban existence, and notes of Jonathan Franzen in the granular disintegration of their parents’ relationship. For lessons on pacing, Cash turned to mid-century noirs and Nathan Hill’s splintered America epic The Nix. “My editor was like, ‘This book is great! If you’ve plagiarised it, I’m going to kill you,’” Cash says, laughing.

But the result of this mish-mash is more than the sum of its parts — and Cash lends Lost Lambs something all her own, a wry wit and propulsive narrative voice that a little mimicry alone can’t explain. She has a knack for dialogue that is sharp in its bluntness: “I’ll be needing bus fare,” Harper told Bud. “How much is the bus these days?” asked Bud. “Five hundred dollars.” Bud gave her five. There’s also a genuine love of wordplay that gives rise to playful store names like “Aunt Tiques”, “Helter Seltzer” and a 19th century British-themed club called “Olive or Twist”. It makes sense that Cash wrote Lost Lambs while working full-time as a copywriter.

Despite the real-life inspiration behind the blood cult, Cash purposefully dialled up the dramatics in Lost Lambs to what seemed a few years ago hyperbolic heights but now appears depressingly believable. “It was really supposed to be this kind of wild Eyes Wide Shut-style mystery and now it seems to be very imaginable,” she says. “I mean, America is kind of crazy right now. We kidnapped the president of Venezuela; we’re in a minor civil war; and then there’s Greenland.”

Conspiracy theories run amok in Lost Lambs. The youngest Flynn daughter Harper is convinced that secret cameras are being used to spy on the town, while another character believes wholeheartedly that the town’s water supply is being poisoned. But these ideas are not presented to be laughed at and in the end Cash is careful to vindicate all of them. The fact is that a mass of misinformation means conspiracy theories no longer feel so far-fetched. Equally, though, do they really matter to your average family like the Flynns? “My biggest concern was paying rent and taking care of my mom so if there was a secret plot behind 9/11 then really, what’s it to me?” says Cash.