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This tender satire of a dysfunctional American family’s search for moral guidance is precisely what our times need

Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her debut novel about the Flynn family, is a witty, quickfire book set in a small American town, punch-drunk on clever, skewering lists and infested typographically by the gnats that plague the local church the family attends (“explagnation”, “extermignation”).

The Flynns are in a mess. It was easy for Catherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve acquired three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine succumbs to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He’s rekindled her artistic ambitions, prompting her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and proclaim an open marriage. She doesn’t yet know that Jim has a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement (“each of these pussies has touched my life”).

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