Cult Classic
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A 2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES
'The witty, improbably propulsive rom-com you didn't know you were waiting for' ELIF BATUMAN
'Razor sharp and very funny on the cult of modern dating' PANDORA SYKES
'So good. I couldn't stop reading it' NICK HORNBY
'Cult Classic makes an uproarious time of romantic carnage' RAVEN LEILANI
'A witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
One night in New York City's Chinatown, Lola is at a dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. The next night, she runs into another ex. And then… another. The city has become awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past.
What might have passed for coincidence becomes something far stranger when the recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship, but the fact that her best friend and her former boss – a magazine editor turned mystical guru – might have an unhealthy investment in its outcome. As memories of the past swirl and converge, Lola is forced to decide if she will surrender herself to the conspirings of one very contemporary cult.
A smart, sharp and hugely entertaining tale of luck and love, Cult Classic asks: is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Essayist Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake) has written one of 2022’s wittiest and most imaginative novels. Lola is 37, newly engaged and feeling ambivalent about settling down when she accidentally runs into an old boyfriend in New York’s Chinatown. The next night, she runs into another ex. And another one the night after that. Is the universe trying to get Lola to reconsider her impending marriage? Or does it have something to do with her former boss—a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan—who has become a new age influencer? A Manhattan romantic comedy that’s got tinges of magical realism, Cult Classic is a story about how relationships fundamentally change who we are, for better or worse. You’ll laugh on every page, but you’re likely to tear up more than once as well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crosley (The Clasp) offers a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City. After Lola, 37, bumps into two exes in two days, she suspects it's more than coincidence. Then her friend Vadis, with whom she used to work at a prestigious psychology journal, drags her to a meeting held by a secretive startup named Golconda run by their charming former boss, Clive Glenn. Clive is putting an obscure theory to the test involving meditation and technological manipulation, in which participants can lure people from their past for a final interaction and closure. Lola balks at the cultlike reverence the others show for Clive, as well as their New Agey vibe, but also hopes to clarify whether she really wants to marry her glassmaker fiancé, Boots. With Boots away for two weeks in San Francisco, she signs up and spends every evening having brief interactions with exes, then returning to Golconda for debriefing. When a stressed-out Clive says they only have funding for one final encounter, Lola discovers something unsettling about the experiment. The accounts of Lola's reckoning with her romantic history are thoroughly hilarious (describing the rush of boyfriends past, she narrates, "I experienced these men as no one is supposed to experience them, as if being propelled from a T-shirt gun"), and the details of online dating, which made her "the victim of a metric ton of rejection," are also sharply perceptive, rooting this very much in the real world. Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye.
Customer Reviews
New York hipster rom-com
3.5 stars
American writer best known for her humorous non-fiction. Contributing editor at Vanity Fair. This is her second novel.
Lola the late thirties protagonist used to work as an editorial assistant at an online psychiatry journal, which went broke. She now works freelance, mostly from home, but gets together regularly with her erstwhile colleagues. One night, she pops out for cigarettes and runs into an old boyfriend. Next night: ditto. Night after that: the same. Her former boss, who reinvented himself as a mystical guru operating out of a refurbished synagogue, explains she is part of a pilot project to help people work out…I’m not sure what. Anyway, our gal’s currently living with, and engaged to, a guy, who goes away for work, so she ends up meeting more old flames, yada, yada, while other old workmates of varying degrees of zaniness help out. All is not what it seems, of course. You’ll have to read the book if you want to know why.
Ms Crosley’s prose is slick and comedic, extremely funny at times, over my head at others. Mileage may vary depending on how much of a hipster you are. (I can be accused of many things. Being a hipster is not one.)