Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela

This is a novel about polyamory and in this one at least it is poly-problematic, as one reviewer coined. In my professional experience this is almost always the case. The push you-pull me of what each person in the relationship wants and needs is hard when there are only 2 people in the mix, and the complications multiply when 3 or 4 people are involved. This novel is told in epistolary form through the narrator’s unsent emails and it opens in the immediate aftermath of a breakup. The breakup, like the relationship, was complicated. He is happily married to his husband, has two children (one of whom is nonbinary), lives in Brooklyn, has an active social life, and works as a public health researcher and professor. Until recently, he was also in a polyamorous relationship with Ben. A whirlwind romance that deepened quickly into love, their relationship was great until the moment Ben dumped the narrator unceremoniously. Nearly swallowed by grief, he fills his overwhelmingly vulnerable letters with sorrow, pining, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, tangents, gay history, therapy speak, pop-culture diatribes, and everything in between. We see very little of the husband's experience--he is pained by how devastatingly heartbroken his spouse is to lose the relationship with Ben but he is equally clear that he is happy enough to see the end of it. The narrator is not down with his spouse seeing another man--that has happened in the past and it did not go well--so there is a lot of polyamory that is left unplumbed in this, but it is a good window into that world if you yourself don't get how it might work.