Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela
Published 2025 · 336 pages · 92,400 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Middle Spoon to read?
Middle Spoon scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Varela's narrator moves through political theory and quantum entanglement, which brings some specialized terms into an otherwise contemporary, conversational register. It sits above Beach Read in diction but well below Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- The letter form and the digressive, looping voice suggest longer, associative sentences, but the contemporary comic register keeps them readable. It is more demanding than Beach Read and far plainer than Midnight's Children.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Heartbreak and domestic life ground the book, while detours into political theory and quantum entanglement lift it into ideas. It is more abstract than It Ends with Us but anchored in personal experience.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A 92,400-word novel that packs political theory, physics and nightlife culture into a letter has more to track than a light romance. The digressions add material without turning it into an encyclopedic book.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A letter addressed to one person means the narrator controls what we learn, and readers must judge his account of his marriage and his boyfriend. The publisher's framing of an ideal life that is not what it seems invites reading around his version.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Quantum entanglement works as a likely metaphor for connection among the narrator, his husband and his boyfriend, and the title image of the middle spoon points the same way. Beyond that, the book reads as contemporary realism with modest symbolic layering, close to The Remains of the Day in restraint.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Billed as funny and eccentric, the narrator's wit plays against the pain of heartbreak and the polished surface of his bourgeois life. The comedy creates a gap between what he says and what he feels, though it stays warmer than Lolita's unreliability.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- A novel about what relationships and family could look like suggests open questions about how a life should be arranged. A heartbreak story in letter form likely offers emotional resolution without tying every question off.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- The epistolary address to a single person and the digressions into theory and nightlife give the book a looser shape than a linear romance like Beach Read. It stays far from fragmented works like Flights.
How Middle Spoon is regarded
Middle Spoon holds a literary regard score of 31 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of Middle Spoon takes place
- New York City, 2020s (2020 to 2025), the main setting