The narrator of Alejandro Varela’s novel-slash-diatribe about polyamory in contemporary gay life is a self-professed overthinker/oversharer who mounts a full-throated defense of open relationships. Polyamorists must await another champion, however, since the one here fails to “make the case.”

The title itself is misleading. A “Middle Spoon” would be one of three people cuddling in bed. Which doesn’t happen in Varela’s conception. An unnamed 40-something, Latino narrator (who seems to be a stand-in for the writer) with an unnamed 40-something white husband and two adopted adolescents, has been dumped by Ben, his younger white boyfriend. While Ben and the narrator carried on a torrid year-long romance, with the permission of the (doormat-y) husband of 20 years, the three only met a handful of times and never slept together. At least physically, then, “Middle Spoon” has no middle spoon.

The title also gives off the vibe of a cutesy romantic caper, maybe with three toothbrushes in the bathroom and lighthearted brush-ins with conventional couplehood. Rather, the grief-stricken, pain-wracked narrator stews for more than 300 pages over losing Ben, earnestly rehashing their crashed relationship. He pleads for another chance. Why see one therapist when two will do? He can’t sleep, is off his gluten-free diet, can barely work at his job.

More, the narrator shoulders a burden much weightier than can be carried by a typical rom-com: He seeks to challenge societal norms about polyamory, to liberate us from the manacles of normative (hetero- and homo-) monogamy. Toss in recurring, preachy critiques of late capitalism and the ravages of racism and classism and you land very far from “Love, Actually.”

Varela, whose debut novel, “The Town of Babylon,” was a National Book Award finalist, has chosen to compose “Middle Spoon” as a series of emails to Ben. The limitations of an epistolary novel are many, and Varela is to be commended for trying to pull it off. He clears a hurdle when we realize the “Dear Ben” letters are in fact emails the narrator composes therapeutically but does not actually send to Ben (though he asks both of his therapists to comment on them, for which I would have charged the patient double).

This lets the author expound on topics — he greatly prefers discourse to storytelling — that would seem absurd contained in yet another letter. It also gives short shrift to the novel’s secondary characters.

The narrator alternately begs Ben for a rapprochement and excoriates his lover for selfishness, even as all signs point to you-know-who as the selfish one who wants the world to bless his desire to have a hot lover to complement his hot hubby. He swears it’s over, until it isn’t. His love affair with Ben has more on-off switches than the cockpit of a 747.

When a girlfriend advises the narrator to move on, the impulse is to swoop in and give her a high-five. He calls another female friend multiple times daily to unload his grief. We want to yell, “Honey, let it go to voicemail.”

The narrator is both super-needy and a shameless virtue signaler, relating that he pursued a career in public health because he “might make the world better.” I’m surprised he didn’t also run four triathlons during grad school. At one point, the narrator confesses his surprise that he, a New Yorker, has never visited the Guggenheim museum, despite being “a bit of a pocket art critic.” Who even says that?

The narrator uses language as a self-help cliché one minute and a big-word salad the next, as in “woe is the person defined by multiple immutable things because those things often combine, creating a new unnameable thing, still immutable but even more damaging insofar as the reactions it elicits, insofar as the walls. Woe is me.”

After exploring myriad nooks and crannies of a three-way, “Middle Spoon” leaves good ol’ monogamy smelling like a rose.

____

Middle Spoon

By: Alejandro Varela.

Publisher: Viking, 321 pages.

©2025 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.