Rating: B+ | 87% | ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger as the recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie, as Lola is forced to decide if she will surrender herself to the conspiring of one very contemporary cult. Spoiler-Free Review: For Cult Classic’s Lola, signing a New York lease is commensurate with signing a custody agreement with millions of strangers to share the same handful of concrete—to negotiate terms for loving and leaving each other. Two things are integral to Cult Classic: New York and love. They work in tandem. There is no love for Lola without New York, and there is none of Lola’s New York without love. People around me love to talk about the “organ” of the city, the cacophony of jobs and cabs and lives that roar outside walk-up windows. Sloane Crosley captures all of this in fewer than 300 pages. Cult Classic is not one story but many; it covers the gamut of the different types of love that exist in the world, stretching from age 18 to age almost-40. Lola is not flawed because she has had so many relationships; she is all the better for it, and so are the many women in the world who share the same history. The novel is wonderful, strange, compassionate, and utterly charming. It is a novel for everyone, but especially for those who have ever doubted the existence of love in this modern age. (Click “Read More” for spoilers.)
Plot (26/30): Novels that rely on vignettes—of which Cult Classic is (tentatively) one—will almost always struggle with balance. Some chapters will undoubtedly shine more than others, and in Cult Classic, these luminous chapters come in the middle, outpacing the slow beginning and the perplexing finale. Jonathan, Howard, Cooper, and the exes in these center chapters appear and disappear quickly; what is crucial is Lola’s tender introspection. Cult Classic is a novel about the seductiveness of poking bruises, and it is in this second act where Crosley strikes the right chord between pain and wisdom. The ending clouds the novel. By this point, Clive and the Golconda are arbitrary to the novel and arbitrary to Lola’s development. The final chapter is perhaps Crosley’s way of remaining in dialogue with modernity, and modern love—the unnervingness of Clive’s cult, the digital footprints that allowed Lola to reconnect with her exes, the slow death of print media—but it is half-hearted and wan. Maybe you just loved what you’d built so much, you woke up in the haze of the city’s small hours,
Characters (30/30):
One of the great achievements of Cult Classic is Crosley’s ability to thin out the characters as Lola approaches complete peace with her past. Lola’s ex-boyfriends are all distinct and fascinating (and horrifying), from Amos the ridiculous writer to Willis the Olympian to Boots. But an ever-evolving Lola eclipses all of them. By the end of the novel, the reader yearns not for another salacious, ridiculous ex-boyfriend but for Lola to return to a baseline she has never experienced. Writing (17/20): One of the novel’s weakest points is its discrepancy between beautiful writing at the sentence level and its inability to decide if it is fantasy, science fiction, realistic fiction, or a combination of all three. The introduction of the Golconda is stifled and almost nervous, as if Crosley herself is not sure what it is. Some novels occupying an interstitial space between genres draw strength from their lack of obligation towards comprehensive world-building. A detail here and a detail there will suffice. But in this case, there are so few details, and so much importance attached to the Golconda, that it feels irresponsible to include it at all. Still, Crosley is immensely sharp and observant. This novel evokes tears as much as it evokes laughs, and when Crosley hits her stride—as she does in many of these chapters—she dazzles. For a while, any year that began with a “20” felt comfortably contemporary. But now people born
Closure / Set-Up (14/20):
And now the other weakness of the novel. The ending stems from the haphazardness of Golconda and its origins. The last chapter does a disservice to both Clive and Lola—the former resigned to an underdeveloped gray morality and the latter forced to explain a story that is not hers. But admirably, the hazy ending—replete with mysterious love and not-love between these foils—tosses the reader’s question back at them: what does this all mean to you?
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