Madeline Cash has had many infestations in her life. On a recent day in London, she let in a bearded exterminator to spray her apartment for moths. Like her debut novel, \u201cLost Lambs,\u201d her flat had been overtaken by pesky flying bugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first step is admitting you have a problem,\u201d Cash said, flashing the perforated hemline of her skirt.<\/p>\n
In her off-kilter book from this winter<\/a>, about a lovable, oddball family, it is not only the local church that is infested by gnats. The bugs travel onto the page, infesting the spelling of the words: extermignate, gnaturally, desitgnation. It\u2019s one of many gags in her jester grimoire.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to do the opposite of diaristic autofiction,\u201d she said. \u201cI wanted to do something maximalist.\u201d<\/p>\n Cash, a 30-year-old writer who grew up in California, had come to London to be with her boyfriend, a filmmaker who is studying at Central Saint Martins. The move had taken her out of New York, where she was part of the literary circle that had started gathering in and around Chinatown during the pandemic around publications like The Drunken Canal<\/a>, Heavy Traffic<\/a> and Forever<\/a>, which Cash had founded with two friends.<\/p>\n A crop of fiction has sprouted from this downtown milieu over the last two years, including \u201cMy First Book<\/a>\u201d by Honor Levy, \u201cFlat Earth<\/a>\u201d by Anika Jade Levy, and \u201cParadise Logic\u201d by Sophie Kemp. What sets this cohort apart is a generational affect that values artifice over nature, theatricality over authenticity, candy vapes over natural wine.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were told that we could never buy property and that the climate was going to destroy us,\u201d Cash said. \u201cWhat else can we do but make art about it? So we got drunk and put on costumes and threw parties and published ridiculous stories and didn\u2019t think about censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n The essayist and critic<\/a> Sam Kriss sees some promise in the movement. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I could point to any contemporary literary movements that are coming up with anything vastly better,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d love it if they\u2019d all found something to write about other than themselves, though \u2014 that would be very encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLost Lambs\u201d would seem to suggest otherwise. Called \u201cthe first internet novel with broad appeal,\u201d<\/a> it has been sold to 21 countries since it came out in January. The art-house studio A24 has acquired the book for a limited series.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, Chinatown is like the Algonquin Round Table,\u201d Cash said. \u201cThis is where the best minds of my generation are. And people love to hate from outside the club.\u201d<\/p>\n She led the exterminator to the study. On a desk, \u201cThe 12 Step Prayer Book\u201d was stacked on top of a copy of \u201cInfinite Jest\u201d adorned with Hello Kitty stickers.<\/p>\n The pest controller scribbled an insecticide note as he prepared to spray the flat. \u201cShould be all right to head back in about two days.\u201d Cash took a frantic look around the room.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything will work out as it should,\u201d she said. \u201cGod never sends mail to the wrong address.\u201d<\/p>\n Moth Exile<\/p>\n Temporarily cast out of her apartment, Cash\u2019s first stop in her moth exile was the local pub. Eyeing a sign reading \u201cNO CHILDREN AFTER 7 P.M.,\u201d she suggested we take our drinks outside. \u201cI may want to um, chain-smoke, which I shouldn\u2019t do tonight in the hotel,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Cash, who grew up in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, sipped from a pint of Coke. She was wearing white socks, black ballet flats and a black woolen cardigan. A gold crucifix hung around her neck. It belonged to her grandmother, a Croatian immigrant on her father\u2019s side.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was the only one in that family who was nice to me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n For \u201cLost Lambs,\u201d Cash drew from her upbringing. Her mother is an actress who became a hospice nurse when her Hollywood jobs dried up. Her estranged father, she said, is a \u201cvery conservative Navy guy\u201d who lives in San Pedro, a Los Angeles neighborhood not unlike the unnamed port town where her book is set.<\/p>\n \u201cI have the classic \u2018dad-took-off-on-me\u2019 story,\u2019\u201d she said, lighting a cigarette. \u201cHe had a kind of replacement family on an insane property I would sometimes visit on the weekends. He had a pet peacock in a sun room.\u201d<\/p>\n Cash\u2019s characters go to comedic extremes to find connection outside the shaky family unit. One daughter joins a terrorist cell; a second dates a war veteran who goes by War Crimes Wes; a third tumbles down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Religion emerges as a big theme. There\u2019s a cinephile priest, a promiscuous church lady and a dubious support group at the local parish.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen all this new Catholicism came around, that was very fascinating to me,\u201d Cash said, referring to a mini wave of conversion<\/a> among the downtown set in New York. \u201cAll these kids who had grown up with parents that rejected orthodoxy were now returning to it, like, needing something. And it wasn\u2019t necessarily the teachings of the Catholic church, but just community.\u201d<\/p>\n She shared some of that yearning. In Los Angeles during the pandemic, Cash was struggling to get her career started. She had interned for The Onion and \u201cConan,\u201d but was considering giving up on comedy.<\/p>\n In search of something more stimulating, Cash set out to organize a reading at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where she had worked as a teenager.<\/p>\n The reading brought her back in touch with her high-school best friend, the writer Anika Jade Levy, who helped organize the event. They read each other\u2019s work and traded takes on the writing that had emerged in the 2010s. In their view, none of it seemed to capture the chaos and dysfunction that had come to define the Covid era. They also kept an eye on the literary scene \u2014 and sensibility \u2014 that was emerging on the opposite coast.<\/p>\n