What Belongs to You: A Novel

I was swept away by the beautiful writing and emotional intensity of this new novel. I had to reread some sentences and stop and contemplate some chapters. And that's good. My thanks to Mr. Greenwell.

This is a truly amazing book, especially because it is a debut novel. The story quietly gives the reader a full glimpse into the head and heart of the narrator/protagonist who struggles with the difference between love and lust for another man. The writing was sublime, moody and emotional.I look forward to more from the very talented Garth Greenwell.

This was a interesting book to read. However, some of the writing was so intentionally obtuse that after reading it many times over I still could not figure out what the author was trying to say. Paragraphs and sentences were not concise and reader friendly. I guess that the author was demonstrating to the reader his Iowa Writer's Workshop breeding.

Original, complete review available at HereWeAreGoing, here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/reading-not-little-lives-by-garth-greenwell-and-paul-lisicky/

I don’t know how to begin. I have been trying for days to come up with an opening sentence for this appreciation, struggling to find an angle, an introduction, some way to communicate some glimmer of the poetries, perplexities, and perfections of this novel. I can’t. So, let Mr. Greenwell’s opening two sentences work their mesmeric power on you, as they did on me. Listen:

That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely. But warning in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there.

Confronted with the hypnotic repetitions and rhythms of those sentences, their complications of emotion and intricacy of language, I immediately stopped, went back and read them again. After which, I stopped, again, got myself a pencil and sticky-arrow-notes, and started scribbling in the margins, taking to Twitter to declare my euphoric, ecstatic reveling in such glorious writing.

In those two sentences Mr. Greenwell tells us so much about the narrator. While he names the object of his desire, his betrayer, Mitko B., he does not name himself, not here, nor in the remaining pages of the story. The repetition of should, warning, desire, and part, along with the rhythms of element, coterminous, ubiquitous, inescapable, tell us this is a man who listens and lives in layers. We are in his head and his heart and his groin as his inner monologue tells us: “I should have known, so I should have desired less; but that desire that should have lessened with the warning of the initial betrayal, is the desire that compels the un-named me to this place; this desire which is conflated with, inseparable from the warning, the warning being a large part of the compulsion.”

There is such connectivity in the choice of words he repeats, and in their repetition a compelling, compulsive, complexity and hastening, the experience is building for us as it happens to him in the way a musical composition repeats phrases and themes. All of which is brilliant enough for an initial two sentences, but then Mr. Greenwell adds a layer of juxtapositioning, limning encounter and betrayal, minor and greater, bathrooms and National Palace of Culture, the introduction of his laser-like application of dichotomy of language, emotion, and experience that continues throughout this novel, symphonically communicating the contrapuntal and atonal spiritual and emotional disunion in the heart of our un-named narrator.

I worried when reading the spellbinding first few sentences that this would be another of those novels that begins with such promise and ultimately disappoint. For naught. From my stunned, breathless appreciation of its opening, to my first sobbing on page 34, to my recognition of myself and my experiences over and over again in these pages, to the brilliant loss of self and initial disconnect described on page 73, to the crippling ever-after scarring of first unrequited love so eloquently painted on pages 90 and 91, to the painful final discoveries of truth on page 190-191 that left me — again — in tears of recognition and sorrow and appreciation for the effort and genius of this work, yes, from beginning to end, this was a work of magical, once-in-a-generation numbing, ensorcelling accomplishment by a virtuoso of literature.

Much has been made of late about naming — about finding — the Great Gay Novel, and despite the ever-contracting world of publishing, there seems an expansion of opportunities for writers of what is often called diversity. I’ll spare you my cosmologo-pollyanna-ish-angry-loving-hippie-esque-nirvana-utopia-dreamworld take on why all this labeling is ultimately so harmful and reductive, but, if we must choose a Great Gay Novel, let it please be this one.

When I was young, it was Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and John Rechy’s City of Night that told me stories about other gay men, some other gay men. Those books were not available to me in my local bookstore and although I was from the time I began first grade called out as every derogatory term for boys who loved other boys, I was still not publicly declared and so I had to go to some trouble, take some risks to find and get and hide these books, and I read them furtively. During the years of my circumspect, secretive non-living of my truth, at thirteen and fourteen, I was falling in what felt like love to me with someone who was, I now believe, not much gay. Had the world been different — not a prison of labels and naming — we’d have been boyfriends for a while, broken up, moved on. As it was, he, B, was just the first in a line of scars I still bear which included when I was seventeen and eighteen, C, and then in my twenties and thirties, A — who ruined me forever for love, and later, a different sort of tragic and deep connection that didn’t fit anywhere in the world in which we lived, the weight of which caused implosion, confusion, and untethered fury for both of us, and, well, these men all loved me after a fashion, and I loved them, but in each case their desire for me was less than their desire that no one — including themselves, really — know they loved me, and, worse, my acquiescence to and acceptance of that condition.

It was a kind of love particular to many (certainly not all, but many) gay lives.

Which is why, I understand, we still need gay novels. Because, had I not had Mxs. White and Rechy, when growing up I would have felt even more alone and abandoned and afraid than I did. And yet it is that fear, that alone, which is the why, I hope you understand, I wish we didn’t need gay novels. I want that world, my imagined cosmologo-pollyanna-ish-angry-loving-hippie-esque-nirvana-utopia-dreamworld, where we are all first and foremost HUMANS. We are not our gender or our attractions or our ages or shapes or incomes or anything other than our SOULS. I want that world so that there never have to be young people who feel “OTHER” because of who they find themselves attracted to.

But, yes, things are getting better. Heartening that both Mr. Greenwell and Mr. Lisicky in his memoir, released the same day, The Narrow Door, discuss Walt Whitman’s poetry in their books. There have always been gay writers, but it is only now in an age where freedom to love who we love burgeons that the reclamation has begun, and reclamation and clarification of the past, a revisionist inclusion-ism as it were, is an important step on the way to my utopian “we are all equal souls” world. So, important to know now, Whitman belongs to the pantheon of writers whose experience was informed by their attractions to people of the same gender; as we declare our presence in the present, we also claim our past. Evolution of culture and society is about re-examining, re-defining, finding new ways to interpret old truths that shed old skins, undo old lies. Greenwell’s narrator says of Whitman:

I understood his desire to be naked before the world, his madness, as he says, to be in contact with it. I even felt something of that desire myself, though it was nothing like madness for me, in my life lived almost always beneath the pitch of poetry, a life of inhibition and missed chances, perhaps, but also a bearable life, a life that to some extent I had chosen and continued to choose.

What sentences! What thoughts! What truths for so many (I suspect, for when something resonates with me — such is my ego — I assume there is a world of people for whom it also resonates)! However, Mr. Greenwell frequently works at the pitch of poetry. This, when the narrator is told by a sad, withdrawn Mitko:

…I want to live a normal life. I was silent for a moment, torn between a terrible sadness and my desire for escape. And then, watching his [Mitko’s] face, I don’t want to be one of your clients, I said. He turned to me in surprise, saying But you aren’t a client, you’re a friend, but I waved this objection away. I like you too much, I said, clumsily but with candor, it isn’t good for me to like you so much.

I have said those words. Who hasn’t said those words? Who hasn’t loved more than was good for them? This isn’t a gay novel or a diverse novel, this is a human story, a poem told about a soul with whom we can all identify. This is a love story and a Bildungsroman and a weighing of where the culture is now in contrast to where it was when the narrator’s father disowned him and an embrace of the blatantly, celebratory erotic urge. It is, in short, a life. Not little. Despite its less than two-hundred pages this is a very large life, and a great novel – gay novel, yes, but human novel, certainly.

A gorgeously written book, with prose that manages to be almost poetic. Our narrator, who remains unnamed, is an American expat working as a teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is a foreigner, a non-fluent speaker of Bulgarian, a homosexual in a country where it is relegated to the shadows, an estranged son, and a man unsure of what he wants. Greenwell has written something that reads less as a novel with an overarching plot, than as a series of meditations or interludes dealing with broader themes of desire and disgust, belonging and ostracization, dominance and submission, facades and truth, shame and self-realization.

Told in three parts, the first and third sections deal largely with the narrator's life in Sofia and how that life is unsettled when he encounters a young man in an underground bathroom frequented by those seeking to purchase sexual favors. Mitko is at once a foil to and contrast with the narrator--electric and confident and forceful, chameleon-like as he plays to a customer's expectations. While Greenwell masterfully portrays the illicit encounters between Mitko and the narrator, conveying the combined lust and longing with the underlying tawdriness, the heart of the matter is not sex and the most interesting parts are not the sexual ones. Instead, you see both characters groping for identity and stability in their lives, and you witness the obvious and subtle manipulations Mitko works on the narrator and the narrator's own willingness to be manipulated. Even more, you see the interesting and shifting power dynamics, with the narrator being nominally in charge as the patron and Mitko in desperate need for money, but with Mitko in control of how close he allows the narrator to get and wielding his magnetism (and later a certain physical intimidation and threat of violence) that makes his position often seem superior. Perhaps most striking is the ongoing description of how the narrator wants this to be more than a paid encounter, wants to think of himself as benevolent and them as friends, wants to avoid being crude or crass. By the third section, the sexual relationship is all but over (with two years having passed from the initial section), the narrator is in a committed relationship, but Mitko still manages to have an out-sized effect on the narrator's daily life.

The middle section is told mostly in flashback and recalls the narrator awakening to his attraction to men, his first physical encounters, and the deterioration and eventual severing of his relationship with his father. Here we meet his stepsisters, get insight into how the utter rejection by his father shaped him, and the secrets his father was keeping. Through the step-sister and the father, we find echoes of earlier themes dealing with the faces we present to the world and the aching need to belong.

A brief but beautiful book, painful in turns and uncomfortable, but a treasure.

In December, the book discussion group met at The LGBT Center in NYC to discuss "What Belongs to You" by Garth Greenwell. It was a lively and upbeat discussion from the sizeable turnout. The consensus was overwhelming positive. Personally, I loved the book.

Most everyone thought that the novel was short and very well written with grand style. Garth is a poet so the language is rich and atmospherically captures the flavor of the exotic Bulgarian locale. Greenwell is writing for a gay audience directly addressing the issues of sex, longing, and cruising.

The novel appears in three parts. The unnamed narrator meets Mitko, the Bulgarian hustler, in the first section and develops "the feels," as one group member previously described the emotion that two people casually sharing sex begin to develop. The second section, "A Grave," describes the narrator's unhappy coming of age in Kentucky with a brutal father and a manipulative friend in a single unparagraphed stream of consciousness. Mitko does not appear in this section. The final section, "Pox," tells about the unhappy reunion between the narrator and Mitko, and hints at the final failure of the two unavailable men to connect. There's not a lot of story and no real plot twists, so language carries the book along (again, Greenwell is a poet).

One of my favorite scene-setting and ultimately meaningful quotes appears early in the novel: "Mitko turned back..., as docile as if our transaction had already taken place; maybe in his mind it was already a sure thing, as it was in mine, though I pretended to be skeptical of the goods on offer, trying to assert some mastery over the overwhelming excitement I felt. I looked down at his crotch and then back up, saying 'Kolki ti e,' how big are you, the standard phrase, always the first question in the Internet chat rooms I used. Mitko didn't say anything in response, he smiled and stepped into a stall and unbuttoned his fly, and my pretense of hesitation fell away as I realized I would pay whatever price he wanted."

The theme of travel by an American to an exotic location was successfully explored. In the past years, we've read and discussed a number of young Americans-abroad and becoming themselves novels: "Necessary Errors" by Caleb Crain in Prague; "Black Deutschland" by Darryl Pinckney and "The Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood, both in Berlin; and "In a Strange Room" by Damon Galgut in multiple European and Asian cities.

A number of readers found parallels between themselves and the characters in the novel with depictions of the complexities of a difficult relationship between two emotionally unavailable gay men.

Pungent descriptions of the book included bittersweet, sad, tragic, realistic, factual, completely internalized pain, and masterful.

A few readers had negative reactions, calling the novel retrograde (What's with the character named "K"? Who's he protecting? Isn't this a novel, rather than a memoir?). Some thought that there was a scent of self loathing, a familiar scenario with the typical troubled, codependent gay characters behaving like men in a 19th century novel, but it all seemed very modern to me.

Some also complained about the verbiage and self-conscious writing style of lengthy paragraphs, lots of commas (see the above quote!) and no dialogue. Some of the details designed to develop the character became heavy and impersonal. Reading about the slog home after reading the email about his father’s illness does add depth to the narrator's history but sometimes the details of how much mud was on his shoes becomes a burden.

For more about Greenwell, read his "I've been cruising since I was 14" interview in The Guardian. And his New Yorker short story, "An Evening Out," from the same unnamed narrator in Bulgaria.

This is how literary fiction is done. Meditative, like an extended prose poem; reflective: an exploration of love and loss.

While told from a gay man's point of view, What Belongs To You is a universal and haunting study of the human heart, our desire for connection, and how the mind & soul (and even physical body) works out parts of our past to reconcile our present understanding of intimacy.

Garth Greenwell's prose reminds me of some of my favorite writers: Flaubert, Walt Whitman, and Proust. A confident debut—Greenwell is a writer to watch for long into the future.

I added Garth Greenwell’s debut novel titled, What Belongs to You, to my reading queue after it was longlisted for the National Book Award. Within two hundred finely written pages, Greenwell offers a complex psychological novel that he presents using exquisite prose. The narrator is a young American gay man living in Bulgaria teaching English. He visits a public restroom and pays for sex with Mitko, a young Bulgarian man of limited means. Greenwell draws readers into patterns of desire, shame, obsession, loneliness and most of all alienation. However Greenwell does it, love and disgust can be in the same paragraph and a reader can remain interested and involved in this complicated relationship.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

"How extraordinary that with the press of a key, allowing no time for regret, my screen should be filled with his moving image, dear to me against after the long absence."

This is a dense book despite being so short.

First, the lack of dialogue leads to lengthy descriptions and half-page long paragraphs that are hard to break down. It's the kind of book you really have to dedicate time to reading.

Second, it's a very dark book that will pull at all of your emotions. As things picked up I began to find the story moving faster, but it's still an emotionally-charged read.

I wish there had been more resolution and more growth in our main character, but it's an intriguing story about a complicated situation.

A richly unforgettable novel about what happens when a lonely teacher, in a foreign land, meets Mitko, a street hooker, and allows desire, lust, and loneliness (to) lead him precariously close to self-destruction as the combination mixed into a toxic broth delivers him to pathetic and needy. WHAT BELONGS TO YOU is a breathtakingly well-written story depicting the overwhelming need for love and acceptance—and the unshakable belief if you save someone else, you will save yourself?

Garth Greenwell’s short novel (191 pages) seems to have made quite a stir in the literary world. I recently glanced at reviews in either the ADVOCATE or OUT magazine and the NEW YORK TIMES, no small accomplishment for a writer with his debut novel. The book is certainly worth your time although I would not say it approaches either THE REMAINS OF THE DAY or CALL ME BY YOUR NAME as Jamie Quatro opines on the inside of the jacket cover. What Mr. Greenwell does do is create an unforgettable character in Mitko, the hustler whom the narrator meets in a tearoom (translation: men’s room where men either pick up other men for sex someplace else or do the dirty there) in Sofia. The novel then is primarily about their on-and-off relationship, if you can call it that, interspersed with the narrator’s memories of a less-than-happy childhood somewhere in the American south.

WHAT BELONGS TO YOU addresses the age-old dilemma of two people who are connected only by sex, particularly when one party is paying the other. And how do these individuals handle their emotions if one or both of them move from the casual sex to someplace else in their relationship? Additionally there is the problem of how two people who are from such different worlds handle their feelings for each other. Mr. Greenwell also writes about homophobia, both in the outside world and more sadly in families, a topic as timely as the nightly news when we learn that families are still abandoning their gay and lesbian children in this country. Although I am not prepared to speculate about Bulgaria I suspect that conditions there are no better and perhaps worse.

Mr. Greenwell’s trump card is that he can create evocative and haunting passages that draw the reader completely into his world. Three passages of many: the scene when the narrator as a youngster takes a shower with his father, the scene between him and his friend K (Only Mitko has a name in the novel) in the bedroom when they are just entering puberty and the scene on the train when the narrator and his mother, who is visiting from the U. S., encounter the youngster and his grandmother.

It's a beautifully written novel. I'm only adding my own review because I was born and grew up in Bulgaria. He captures the atmosphere of the country extremely well - the decaying infrastructure and shrinking population, the rampant homophobia, the natural beauty, the locals who can be both surly and super-friendly, and lots of little observations that make the novel so amazing.

He also has a real feel for the language. The scenes involving the main character checking if he has an STD were hilarious and made me cringe at the same time. He made that part of the story work so well because of the language barrier and cultural differences (little respect for privacy).

The novel could be set anywhere in the world - it's a sort of a love story - but the author learned things about Bulgaria and the second main character, Mitko, is convincing and complex. Bulgaria isn't just a meaningless, picturesque background for the author's inner life.

It's a gem of a book.

Gay Human Bondage, but gimme Philip & Mildred. A pedestrian plot, albeit written lyrically, has grabbed the critical mob and lemming readers. Too many gay Americans are going to Europe, it seems, hiring rent boys and then deciding they must Tell Their Woeful Story. I wish they'd shut up or come up with a new plot....

Beautifully written story of an expat teacher running away from his past, and his present, for that matter. Centers on his obsession with a young Bulgarian man and how that plays out. I was impressed with the author's use of language. Some might dismiss the book as so much navel gazing, but I think the author skillfully avoids that. I recommend it.

Beautifully written. Poetic. Heartbreaking. The non-traditional structure of the text is so artfully constructed that you won't get lost. Don't let it scare you off! The stream-of-consciousness voice breathes life into the angst, urgency, and confusion of the narrator - so it serves the novel well. Great debut!

In this stunning lyric novel, Greenwell moves between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Louisville, Kentucky, tracing the life of his unnamed narrator through a transactional—and often wrenching—relationship with a young Bulgarian hustler, Mitko. An American teaching at a respected school in Sofia, the narrator first meets Mitko at a cruising spot located in bathrooms the National Palace of Culture and becomes entangled with him, forging a connection that launches him into new understandings of himself and his origins—and the nature of desire. A book that should be read as much for its ability to expand one's humanity as for its gorgeous prose.

The problems with Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs To You, begin with the title , which seems to have no connection to the book. But the biggest problem is the emotional limitations of the narrator, who seems to exist in protracted adolescence.

I would venture a guess that Greenwell’s models as a writer are European. I found myself thinking of Camus on more than one occasion.

I will say that the facility of Greenwell’s prose kept me going to the end.

Is this just pornography, or what? Terribly boring. Couldn't care less what happens to these two men . . . couldn't finish this tale. Shows us how desperate and pretentious the big guys are that try to tell us what to like.

Is this just pornography, or what? Terribly boring. Couldn't care less what happens to these two men . . . couldn't finish this tale. Shows us how desperate and pretentious the big guys are that try to tell us what to like.

Engrossing and intense. A glimpse into an alien and utterly convincing setting and character. Stripped-down prose. An unhappy story and grim circumstances made it hard for me to love this, but I admire it tremendously for its sinewy power.

Very difficult read. It is punctuated like free-floating thought, with long run-on sentences. Also, there don't appear to be any paragraphs other than the beginning of each chapter. On and on it goes, with comma after comma, until you're ready to scream. The story is good, the characters are good, but this man is in dire need of an editor.