THE MONOSEXUAL

In Monti’s comic novel, a hapless medical reporter attends a conference in the hopes of winning back the love of his life.

It’s 1999, and seasoned journalist Vincent Cappelini has been hired to cover a dermatologists’ conference for the Giornale della Faccia, Italy’s premier dermatology journal. It’s an easy gig, interviewing sunscreen-slathered skin doctors around a hotel pool, but Vincent’s real interest lies in the fact that the conference is being held in San Caliente, California, the seaside town where Melissa Taylor, his ex-girlfriend who left him 13 months ago, now resides. Vincent’s ongoing preoccupation with Melissa is about more than unrequited feelings. He considers himself monosexual, a term of his own coinage that combines the characteristics of demisexuality and monomania. Monosexuality is Vincent’s “self-appointed, glittering, gold badge of honor. A rare, eclectic, yet-to-be-discovered phenomenon that makes him special, makes Melissa special. Makes being with Melissa extra special.” He arrives at San Caliente’s El Famous hotel, quickly falls asleep by the pool, and suffers a horrible sunburn. The conference only goes downhill from there: Vincent gets food poisoning from off-menu fugu (pufferfish), runs into his least favorite former co-worker, and reignites the passions of an unstable pig-skin researcher, whose past advances led to Vincent’s termination from a previous job. Most troubling of all is the tempting presence of Paige, a hotel employee whom Vincent might even find attractive, despite her not being Melissa: “She’s definitely someone who would have given Vincent pause—before Melissa,” Monti writes. “It’s a first impression….But like auras, Vincent puts a lot of stock into his first impressions.” Madcap happenings, including a Frank Sinatra–themed karaoke competition, lead Vincent to finally confront the horrible truth at the center of his monosexuality, once and for all.

Monti displays a cartoonish humor that keeps his protagonist’s disturbing obsession from darkening the novel’s tone. For example, everything on the hotel’s “presidential floor” is uncomfortably undersized as an homage to five-foot-four James Madison. Vincent calls the hotel’s front desk to complain about the Madison suite he’s been booked into and asks if there’s a Lincoln suite he might take instead (since Lincoln, was, of course, quite tall); the voice on the line replies, “There’s no Lincoln Room on the presidential floor. The Lincoln room is on the Luxury Car level….There’s also a Lincoln room on the New York Tunnel Floor. That’s the sixth floor. Lincoln, Holland, and Queens Midtown…all very nice rooms. Long rooms.” The book vacillates between using the neurotic Vincent as the locus of its humor and satirizing the world around him, which has the effect of capturing the peculiar alienation of heartache: Sometimes Vincent seems to be the lone sane man in a delusional world, and at other times, he appears to be the lone delusional man in a sane one. This is a poolside read that has more beneath its surface than initially appears, and it offers readers an often funny and always engaging look at how, sometimes, people need to be pulled through the healing process—even when they don’t think they’re ready to move on.

A comic take on obsession and the painful process of romantic recovery.