The Unhappy Literary Families of the Internet Age
The family at the center of Madeline Cash’s first novel, Lost Lambs, is falling apart. Bud and Catherine Flynn have begun a “nonconsensual nonmonogamous spell.” They are too busy scorching each other’s insecurities to cook dinner, more concerned about their own sleeping arrangements than about the eroding bedtimes of their three wayward daughters. Cash’s characters are believable and specific, but contrary to Tolstoy’s famous adage, this unhappy family is, in key respects, like many others. Hemmed in by selfishness, alienation, and subcultural silos, the fracturing Flynns share a kinship with the casts of unhappy-family classics such as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. But because Lost Lambs is being published in 2026, its unhappiness derives not from Roth’s “indigenous American berserk,” Franzen’s Y2K anxiety, or Smith’s postcolonial pressure cooker, but from the internet.
Online is where Louise, the Flynns’ middle child, meets an Islamic-fundamentalist user named yourstruly. It’s where Harper, the youngest, researches conspiracy theories involving her father’s shadowy tech-billionaire boss, Paul Alabaster. Online discourse lurks behind even offline behavior—Bud and Catherine’s polyamorous phase; the age-gap dalliance of their eldest daughter, Abigail, with an edgy vet nicknamed War Crimes Wes. In Lost Lambs, the internet sabotages a family in much the same way that Napoleon messes things up for the Bezukhovs in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This makes Cash’s debut one of the first works—and, let’s hope, not the last—to meld the old genre of the unhappy family with a much younger variety: the internet novel.
The proper internet novel, as I see it, is defined by more than just its subject and setting. These are not books in which the internet is a mere plot device, current event, or academic interest (as in Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability and Dave Eggers’s The Circle). Instead, they are fiction about, and often by, people whose offline life is inextricable from their online presence. These are novels that take seriously, and describe intimately, the impact of living with a smartphone and constant access to social media. Such works do not necessarily focus on the experience of scrolling—although they can, as in Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. But they consider the effect of spending four to six hours a day on the same two or three apps (Instagram, TikTok, X). The supremely disaffected narrator of Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth, for example, continually cuts her fingers on the broken screen of her phone.
Cash has a great deal of experience with this kind of writing: For a few years, along with Levy, she edited the buzzy literary journal Forever Magazine. Founded in 2020, Forever was consciously built on “the low quality aesthetic of the early digital age” and during Cash’s tenure it sought out writing that reflected it: dry, glib, generally out of conversation with traditional literature. Cash and her colleagues published authors who might have been deemed too rough, too déclassé, and most of all too terminally online for traditional publications. In one short story by Cash, a character rattles off a list of addled misfits that could double as a list of Forever contributors: “temps, sex workers, Satanists, the young and beautiful, intravenous drug users, the people who stand outside of art galleries, industry plants,” and so on until the list ends, provocatively, with “all the same.” Indeed, in those pages, many writers bear evidence of the same flattening affect, probably because their online experiences—often limited to a few apps—are overwhelmingly alike.
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Modern fiction can’t make any valid claim to realism without acknowledging that its characters spend perhaps a quarter of their waking hours online. Yet this presents a dilemma: To depict those hours accurately is to risk overfamiliarity, dullness, and disgust. For many, reading is the ultimate offline activity. An internet novel can feel a bit like a soft-serve machine at the gym.
That’s what makes Lost Lambs distinct among internet novels. The reader spends time with someone else’s family, not someone else’s “For You” page. (Even the presence of a family is a change in the genre, in which parents tend to be offstage, nonspeaking, sending money.) We get to see how conspiracy theories and online strangers and vague ideas about open relationships affect the Flynns without the kind of breathless evocations of internet aesthetics and fussy fictional tweets and Instagram posts that afflict novels such as Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. Cash’s prose style has also become emotionally richer: She’s unlikely ever to sound as sincere as Sally Rooney, but she has evolved beyond the cutting stories in her 2023 short-story collection, Earth Angel. She seems to have found a middle distance between dismissiveness and sentimentality.
In addition to sparing readers a confrontation with the luminous now of the Notification Center, Cash also liberates the Flynns from the always-too-late pop-culture references that constrain many internet novels. Instead of Ritalin or Xanax, Abigail takes “blues,” “yellows,” even “purples” (a risky one—originally “manufactured to bring down the rat population”). Instead of investigating Jeffrey Epstein or Peter Thiel, Harper is obsessed with Alabaster, who has his own sinister quirks. Louise meets her Islamist friend, yourstruly, in a chat room for middle children, not on r/redscarepod. (The book is full of fresh coinages: Page Turner’s bookshop, the British pub Olive or Twist, the ice-cream parlor Anne Frank’s Dairy.) This is a novel about the corrosive effect of modern life that doesn’t feel corrosive. Cash is gentle with us—perhaps too gentle.
In classic novels of family crisis, such as John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, husbands or wives or children die. Without spoiling too much, there isn’t much to spoil; Lost Lambs has no such mortal stakes. This aversion to physical harm might look at first like fidelity to real life, in which mortal danger is rare. But in Cash’s world, it feels implausible. In the novel’s most preposterous sequence, Bud—who has been continually threatening to kill himself—reveals that he has a long-standing fantasy of being with a woman less attractive than his wife. More head-scratchers follow. Villains, in Cash’s novel, can’t seem to commit to villainy. Irreconcilable differences are resolved by short periods of self-reflection. The overall effect is one of deflation. In the novel, Cash writes: “When a lamb strays, it’s usually lost to wolves, vulnerable without its flock. But sometimes, just sometimes, if it’s lucky, it finds a new one.” That’s not luck—it’s wishful thinking. Cash hasn’t so much tamed the savagery of the internet as turned on parental controls.
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Lost Lambs has accomplished something major; it reads to me like the first internet novel with the potential for broad offline appeal. But in joining the Zadie Smiths and Jonathan Franzens of the world, Cash has undermined the tension that makes such novels work. Families can form a strong protective unit, but the price of that bond is that when they fail, they become a grief engine. When a child runs off, when a husband sleeps around, when secrets are whispered or truths shouted, people get hurt in a way they never could have alone. That’s why the stakes in family novels seem so high: because other people get hurt too. Cash flinches from this cascade of consequences.
This is a shame, because a great family novel of the internet would need to take online danger seriously. People really do get lost to conspiracy theories. They get messed up chatting with strangers. The internet has the ability to create assassins and sway elections and destroy families, to waste our time and wreck our life. This is the limitation of Cash’s book, and the lesson for the next novelist who aspires to write a grown-up internet novel: It doesn’t mean anything to be a lost lamb in a world without wolves.