Lost Sheep

“Am I contradicting myself, perhaps? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes”: Walt Whitman wrote these words, but they seem tailor-made for the characters in Madeline Cash’s book, Lost Sheep, published by Gramma Feltrinelli and translated by Marco Rossari. Her debut novel takes its starting point precisely from this complexity and dissonance, telling the story of the Flynn family, who live in a small town on the West Coast and are going through a peculiar period that shatters all certainties: “The Flynns’ marital situation seemed neither a 1960s-style experiment nor something in the vein of today’s liberal New Age poly-whatever, but rather a creative arrangement in which husband and wife could freely inflict pain upon themselves and their three daughters.” The father, Bud, works as an accountant at the docks and strikes an absurd – in his view – pact with his wife Catherine, a former artist who suggests to her husband that they embark on an open marriage: “The arrangement was the best solution for everyone. A moral loophole. A creative outlet within the vastness of monogamy’, according to her. Rounding off the family picture are their three daughters: Abigail, aged seventeen, ‘undoubtedly pretty enough to be a recurring character in a Christian soap opera’, who often suffers from heartbreak and is seeing ‘Wes War Crimes’, a former special-contract mercenary; Louise, aged fifteen, is the middle daughter—the one you might describe as ‘neither fish nor fowl’—and she is in love with ‘cordialisaluti’, a mysterious virtual boyfriend she met in a chat room for middle children; finally, Harper, aged twelve, the youngest daughter, is a brash, brilliant whirlwind who scorns authority, has no sense of boundaries and lies through her teeth.

The book follows the lives of the Flynns and their chaos: there are neither role models nor judgements, but only the characters’ urgent need to remain true to themselves wherever they may have lost their way, each in their own way. Their dysfunctional stories, their family crumbling before their eyes, their questions, and their highly creative – and often absurd – search for answers and solutions hold up a mirror to our times. Through a brilliant, ironic, and at times tragicomic style, Cash invites readers to reflect on and question their most complex contradictions with a smile—sometimes bittersweet—that he evokes through a blend of hilarious satire and unfailing tenderness.

    

Madeline Cash
, "Lost
Sheep", Gramma Feltrinelli, 304 pp., 19 euros