What Belongs To You

By Garth Greenwell (Picador, £12.99)

Reviewed by Stephen Phelan

AN American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria, goes looking for anonymous sex in the gents’ public toilets beneath the city’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a hustler of sorts, who becomes a kind of boyfriend. Their relationship remains provisional, conditional, transactional, which seems to preclude a viable life together even as desire gives rise to love, for the unnamed narrator at least.

In its broad outlines and explicit specifics, Garth Greenwell’s widely and rightly lauded debut novel may feel more familiar to gay readers than straight ones. None of us are strangers to longing, of course, but not all know the threat of exclusion or obstruction that so often attends coming out and colours, blights, or thwarts the sexuality of so many.

As he told an interviewer recently: “I’m a queer writer, writing in the queer literary tradition for queer people. And because of those things I hope this is a book for everyone.” Through the particular, in other words, we might apprehend the universal, and Greenwell navigates between them with great deliberation. There might be nothing inherently new in the story of a prostitute and client, but there’s bracing freshness in the telling, mediated as it is through the latter’s memories, impressions, and especially his evasions.

This narrator claims to be an open book, but the novel itself suggests otherwise. In the second of its three sections, Greenwell’s carefully directed stream of consciousness bursts into a torrent of hitherto repressed pain and rage, prompted by news of the narrator’s father’s imminent death. Here we learn about his youthful awakening in an unspecified but expressly Republican region of the US, the rejections that made him reckless and fatalistic, the origins of his exile.

Mitko, for his part, is rendered as a palpable, physical presence even as he also represents a type – a victim of social and economic forces in a Bulgaria where the brief boom of the post-communist years was followed by collapse. He covets the smartphones and laptops that even a poorly-paid American teacher can afford to take for granted. He’s acutely aware of his own decadence, and the way his love is hopelessly tainted by money. But he also seems a little less conscious of his solipsism, as the object of his affection is mediated first through his own imperfect Bulgarian, and second through a filter of fine prose by which he flatters himself as a speaker of truth.

The tension in that language, between nominal transparency and tacit narcissism, produces any number of beautiful results, as when he sits entranced by a fly on the window of an overheated bus, en route to the VD clinic for syphilis treatment.

“That’s all care is, I thought, it’s just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale?” Certainly he cares for Mitko, but the question remains whether looking, and longing, is enough to make another person real to us. And if Mitko remains something of a mystery, the narrator too seems a mystery to himself, gently reminding the reader how hard one’s own heart is to fathom.