Hang the Moon: Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel – Manuel Marrero
July 22, 2024
The world is always unraveling so find the music and dance. Earth Angel, like its 1954 doo-wop namesake, is steeped in enough vintage sheen to feel a little bit untouchable. Like candy melting in your mouth, its velocity is something like constantly evaporating with the melody echoing. It boasts an organicity and earthiness, like clearly Cash isn’t a memetic lightning rod so much as a formally savvy songstress playing familiar standards unassumingly in the wings of a legacy lounge. Tune in and you’ll catch signature flourishes. It’s witty and funny like only a lady can be. It barrels along like a locomotive loosed on an apocalyptic landscape littered with screwball, speculative, and horror tropes. Her generation’s shibboleths and signifiers stop short of irony often enough not to be taken for granted as a spirited showstopping debut. The quirked up futurism of her contemporaries here is tempered by a palatable charisma, vim and panache, a sensitizing allure cast over the schizophrenic tics and tabloid trappings. There’s a squeaky clean MFA shine to it. Cash drops so many Chekhov’s guns it can start to feel monotonous. It’s a one trick pony but it’s a neat trick. And yet she strikes a range of notes, an orchestral melange of alarmism and dread for modernity, innocence and glamor in a blender. Absurd situations. Anxiety about the future. A seductive paramour left as harmless flirtation and innuendo, defying expectation and edging against discipline and restraint, while in another story we are learning a zodiac sign by touching cervical mucus. Relationships are whimsical. Toxic encounters are disarmed by aloofness and a world-weary wisdom. The term earth angel is used once to refer to a kind of suburban middle class feminine ideal, a yuppie precariat that doesn’t quite lampoon tradwife as it subverts girl-next-door. The modulation between painful tenors, saturated with a fantasia of references is aggressive with its whole chest, and you’re never really completely comfortable even as you tend to be able to recognize exactly where you are, because by now you trust the voice. Few writers teach you how to read them so quickly and commandingly. A neobiblical psychogeography of the coastal elite pastiche, tableaux slideshow of trauma-catatonic post-net omnipresent thisness, master class in flash fiction. In one book Madeline Cash has already claimed the holy grail and white whale of millennial hipsters, style. Her upcoming follow-up novel Lost Lambs earns its anticipatory hype. Spirituality is vitality, technological or quaint, Cash never loses control while allowing her narratives to get blissfully lost. And it’s over in two-three sessions. Impossible not to recommend.