The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at,” says Lola, the hero of Sloane Crosley’s surreal new romcom Cult Classic. “If you wait long enough, any place will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs.”
Crosley’s novel finds a Rolodex-worth of Lola’s exes rise up out of the great beyond, bumping into her at restaurants and on street corners within days of one another. At first, she doesn’t understand what’s happening – it’s as if her entire dating history has converged within the two-mile radius of her Manhattan apartment. Whatever the source, though, the encounters prove useful, helping to answer Lola’s many what-ifs: what if she didn’t get engaged to the man she calls Boots, or the Big to her Carrie; what if she didn’t break up with the long-jumper she always had great sex with; what if she could choose to just re-set her life?
