Order THE BOHEMIAN GUIDE TO MONOGAMY here
The process of aging has to be the strangest thing I've ever experienced. It's great because once the "best years of your life" pass, the anxiety of making something out of it passes too and you become happier. It's also terrible because there is such a thing as "young people stuff". Sometimes you have to take long, hard looks in the mirror before doing thing because increasingly more stuff will make you look stupid and desperate as you grow older (i.e. wearing leather pants).
Aging is a fascinating subject that not many authors can tackle from a male perspective without making us look like horny, juvenile jerks. Enter Andrew Armacost and his byzantine bizarro novella The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy, taking an earnest shot at finding the beauty in the heart of the aging American male and doing a great job in general. It is an energetic and creative story that moves to the beat of its own drum.
There is no efficient and straightforward way to explain The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy in one paragraph, but I'll do my best. It is about a married man living a quiet life writing short stories in order to let out some steam. The novella is built out of journal-like dispatches and the narrator's aforementioned short stories, which range from hilarious Superman fan fiction to gory tragedies. That is how he's able to grow older, take his responsibilities and maintain some balance. It works just fine until the day his imagination starts seeping into his real life and the life he carefully constructed for himself is threatening to collapse.
I would describe The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy as a metafictional, sexually charged and pop culture laced satire of maturity and commitment. These things work better with a sense of humor and fortunately, Andrew Armacost is equipped with a tremendous one. For example, the first narrator-penned short story about a brokenhearted Superman traveling to Thailand in search for a new beginning is uproarious. Armacost keeps alternating between the metaphorical (Superman as an image of who the modern man should be) and the literal (Superman as Superman), the reader never knows whether he should step out of comic book lore or not. It's intense and cerebral, but it's funny as hell so it feels instantly rewarding.
There isn't much fiction out there that taps into the intellectual middle-aged male psyche the honesty and lack of judgement The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy shows. We men are horny and juvenile by nature indeed, but some of us aren't hopeless preys to our instincts and figure out efficient ways to keep ourselves in check and there's a definite beauty in that. The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy is about a man building an entire mythology within the confines of his mind in order to protect himself from the outside world and Andrew Armacost writes it with a passion an energy and a sense of humor that make him unique.
The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy was my favorite read so far, this year. Not only it is a thoroughly original, but it addresses a subject that not many authors have been able to address without a slab of cynicism and judgement: men. How men think, carry themselves and grow older. Of course, I identified with the subject a lot, but also with how chaotic Andrew Armacost's narrator's inner life is. The Bohemian Guide to Monogamy is a smart, cerebral and uproarious little book with a beating heart. It's also as gender politics free as this kind of book can get. It's your first mandatory stop for 2016.