Romantic Carnage: Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley
Romantic Carnage: Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley
Welcome to Autofictions, where I review contemporary fiction and share more about myself than anyone needs to know.
First, some preamble:
I’m a nonfiction editor by trade, but outside of work I read fiction almost exclusively. I average a book or two a week; I’m a fast reader but have a pretty garbage memory. This Substack is an attempt to be a little more articulate when folks ask my opinion about something I’ve read.
I called this newsletter Autofictions because I review with extreme subjectivity. This is not only because I’m skeptical about whether objectivity is attainable (or even useful) when discussing any art form, but also because I’m not a professional book reviewer. If I were, I would certainly be doing the craft a disservice with my habit of projecting myself onto any character or experience that remotely resembles my own. So these posts will often end up analyzing some facet of my experience or psyche, hopefully in an entertaining way. Here we go.
Romantic Carnage: Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley
On the cover of the UK edition of Cult Classic is a blurb by Raven Leilani: “Romantic carnage.”
Set aside the premise and provenance, the blurb alone might have reeled me in. I briefly considered posting a photo of it to my Instagram: “Book blurb or my dating history?”
At the beginning of Cult Classic, Lola, a Manhattan magazine editor turned digital media peon, runs into an ex while dining with former colleagues in Chinatown. The next day, dragged to the same restaurant by a different friend, it happens again. Two days, two exes, two tangoes with the ghosts of relationships past. Both in Chinatown.
This is not a coincidence. It’s a scheme set in motion by Lola’s former boss, Clive, who has reinvented himself as a self-help guru and launched a secret society named after a Magritte painting, which will turn out to be a slick touch. Lola is the unwitting proof of concept for the organizationʼs first product offering: romantic-closure-as-a-service.
Clive claims to have developed methods both technological (social media manipulation) and woo-woo (focused meditation) to maneuver a personʼs ex into their vicinity, offering them a chance to heal old psychic wounds. Price tag: $250,000.
Given Lola’s florid dating history, she’s an ideal test subject for the organizationʼs pilot offering: “the Classic,” in which the buyer runs into their exes one by one. Recently engaged Lola is not a particularly willing beta tester, but she agrees to the ploy for the thrill of spooling out her romantic past, ex by ex — even if it comes at the expense of her future with her fiancé.
It’s a premise both delicious and harrowing, and the story unfolds at a brisk pace in engrossing prose: fluid and self-assured, bitingly funny and unexpectedly poetic.
But I did sometimes suspect that Crosley came up with the title first, then tried to manufacture a plot to suit it. For one thing, aside from the hush-hush nature of the operation and the matching pajamas, Clive’s “cult” seems only a shade more ludicrous than some startups, and Lola cries “cult” so many times you could make a drinking game out of it. A character as savvy and acerbic as she could surely have had some fun poking at the parallels between cult leadership and founder worship. Combined with the name of the “package” for which Lola is the coal-mine canary — admittedly, revisiting bygone romances is a classic impulse, not to mention a well-trod trope — the narrative seams felt a little conspicuous.
Occasionally, I found myself unmoored by the sudden reversals and character revelations — contradictions that didn’t always spell “complex human being” so much as “Gordian knot of incompatible motivations.” There’s an improbable reveal, a conveniently timed death, and an unconvincing hookup between two people who have had years to get together but finally do now because… well, I’m not sure.
Still, the blistering wit of the prose and the voyeuristic exhilaration of the plot make Cult Classic eminently readable. Lola charmed me as a fellow recovering romantic calamity. Her penchant for immoderate nostalgia hit a stripped nerve; I, too, am a fantasist who would probably have taken Clive up on his offer against every shred of self-discipline.
Most enjoyable are Lola’s ex-boyfriend archetypes: the studiously disaffected writer to whom monogamy is a personal affront; the affable athlete who seems to have experienced their relationship in a parallel universe; the “hearty sex maniac” with a problematic fetish. They’re delightful in their specificity, inviting the reader (at least, this reader) to catalog their own. I couldn’t help it: the one who unironically proposed we be “casually monogamous”; the un-self-aware musician turned aspiring shadow-work YouTuber; the hot withholding one who said a tarot card told him to break up with me. (Granted, a tarot card told me to start this newsletter, so touché, dude.) I’m a vivid dreamer and have a heap of smoldering amorous wreckage for my subconscious to sift through, so these former flames do shimmy around my skull from time to time. And I, too, had exes emerge from the woodwork when I finally entered into a secure attachment, although I have no evidence that this was due to any sort of sub-rosa manipulation.
So I couldn’t help but feel relieved when Lola achieved her own sort of closure in the end, even if it felt a tad abrupt in a narrative sense. I think all of us nostalgia addicts can stand to be reminded that we’re probably holding on to some ineffectual shame and guilt from that thing that brooding ex you treated like refuse said that was so hurtful but frankly true. Just for instance.
May we all achieve such enlightenment, ideally without our former bosses basing a religion on it, and find a way to reframe our past not as carnage and spoil but as the soil in which our future selves can grow.
Not least because then you get to think of your exes as fertilizer.
Pairs well with:
“Somebody Else” by The 1975
Wine, lots of
Meditation, but not the kind the Golconda practices