Michael Kun's You Poor Monster is as much a puzzle as it is a novel. On one level, it operates as a perfectly normal story about an imperfect and abnormal man: a war veteran, football hero, legendary womanizer, and successful author, or possibly none of the above. At the same time, a lengthy collection of footnotes—more than 200 total—suggest another story, a metanarrative about the book's narrator. According to the notes and an introduction, that narrator demanded sweeping changes in the book before publication: He berates his editor in the footnotes for not deleting some material, while offering hints about what was successfully removed. An entire third story can be read between the lines, from what's carefully not being said. What's left is a fractured series of riffs on the nature of truth and subjectivity, though instead of jumping back and forth and assembling the pieces, readers can just ditch the metanarrative and read You Poor Monster as a straightforward novel.
It may read best that way. Kun's prose is a little self-consciously arty, but his story about a bizarre and problematic pathological storyteller remains compelling even when Kun takes it too far out on a limb. The book opens with a description of Sam Shoogey killing men during an unspecified war—turning "their bodies to fertilizer and their thoughts to pure blue air," according to a phrase that becomes a refrain throughout the book—and then suffering a visit from the intolerable military buddy whose life he saved during one attack. The story is just one of many of Shoogey's oft-repeated colorful autobiographical yarns, according to narrator Ham Ashe, a Baltimore lawyer who winds up assigned to Shoogey's divorce case, and then unwittingly becomes his friend, though the relationship strains Ashe's marriage and sometimes his credibility.
For such a calculated book, You Poor Monster sometimes seems distracted and random; many of the metanarrative footnotes are inessential, space-filling factoids or definitions, and Ashe's attention frequently wanders as he tells a somewhat shapeless story that initially seems like Shoogey's, but instead becomes his own. Even the preoccupied, self-pitying, vaguely off-putting tone of Ashe's narration is part of Kun's meta-story, as what it says about Ashe contributes to every level of the tale. It's a clever device, much as You Poor Monster is a clever, convoluted, narratively ambitious story. But it's still best suited for readers more fascinated with form than content, and for acrostics fans who'd just as soon decode their books as get lost in them.