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.