BEST MEN, gay-male romcom light on rom but very well supplied with com!

BEST MEN
SIDNEY KARGER
Berkley Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When two best men in a wedding party fall for each other, they realize love isn't a piece of cake in this hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy debut by screenwriter Sidney Karger.

Max Moody thought he had everything figured out. He's trying to live his best life in New York City and has the best friend a gay guy could ask for: Paige. She and Max grew up next door to each other in the suburbs of Chicago. She can light up any party. She finishes his sentences. She's always a reliable splunch (they don't like to use the word brunch) partner. But then Max's whole world is turned upside down when Paige suddenly announces some huge news: she's engaged and wants Max to be her man of honor. Max was always the romantic one who imagined he would get married before the unpredictable Paige and is shocked to hear she's ready to settle down. But it turns out there's not just one new man in Paige's life--there are two.

There's the groom, Austin, who's a perfectly nice guy. Then there's his charming, fun and ridiculously handsome gay younger brother, Chasten, who is Austin's best man. As Paige's wedding draws closer, Max, the introverted Midwesterner, and Chasten, the social butterfly East Coaster, realize they're like oil and water. Yet they still have to figure out how to coexist in Paige's life while not making her wedding festivities all about them. But can the tiny romantic spark between these two very different guys transform their best man supporting roles into the leading best men in each other's lives?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Max, 35, is Old. He tells us so himself. As I am damn near twice that age, I got right tired of hearing that nonsense. Max has a disastrous love-life. Max has one friend, Paige, for most of his life, and she is what I would call a collector: someone who gets a lot of people into her orbit and then keeps them there without paying a lot of attention to them. Max himself points this up by mentioning their friendship habit of going to a specific diner and Paige does the same trick of focusing all attention on herself with even the waitstaff...who, like Paige, basically ignore Max.

I am familiar with this kind of "friendship." It happens to a lot of gay guys I know, not the best-looking, not the most outgoing, but who still crave affection and settle for this dark twin of it because it's obvious that the friend is doing them a favor. It's so pervasive in Max's life that he has a friends-with-benefits deal going with his ex...who literally makes the booty call and then tells Max he just needed to get off before his date with the new guy in his life so he wouldn't come across as too sexually demanding!

It's all Max knows, being second-best, so he rolls with witty sarcasm as his defense mechanism. There are lists and texts and all sorts of not-story documents larded in to this too-long but very relatable story of modern friendship among the generation where gay is just a thing you are. These are the people who piss off the old white men who wear traitorous flags to show what patriots they are the most. It's not important that anyone is gay until Paige gets among the older people she needs to make herself different from.

I liked the snark, I liked the honesty about Max's Paige-provided employment and its soul-sucking banal cruelty...which Max is a big part of delivering!...and I liked the scene on Fire Island with Max as the very, very obvious fish out of water. I got no chemistry to explain why Max and Chasten were into each other, it seemed to take forever before anything happened and then it was as though they'd never been at odds or felt aggrieved by the other's presence in Paige's court of admirers. Shall we say there's no real tension resolved and be as discreet as Max himself is about details of his more lurid energies. The narrative is all-Max all the time and for over 300 pages it's a kind of strange thing that we never once see anything but the barest surfaces of Max's responses to anyone.

Self-loathing ≠ introspection.

I'd've preferred a shorter version of the story, or more delving into the real feelings behind Max's witty, bitchy narration. It's okay as a com, but the rom part left me wondering what more there was to all these characters. What makes the read fun is the snark; what needed moe thought was the length. I'll be on the lookout for Author Karger's next book with high hopes.