MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

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

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.