Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a short novel about a small subject that gets it exactly right. The writing is so good, so ensnaring, it may net a large readership. There will be talk that it is "about desire," about "sexual obsession," about the consequences of both, and the talk won't be wrong; it will merely miss what makes this book singular and important. What's great about it is not how universal it is but how special it is in the strictest sense of the word. We who do know its terrain, by heart and by the soles of our shoes, will be amazed we're reading it, that someone could and would write it with such specificity and candor. It's the novel that Isherwood �" and Forster, Baldwin, Maugham and even White �" might have written, didn't write and maybe dodged. However small in size, What Belongs to You is a novel no one would call A Little Life.
In that post-postmodern way, it's precisely about what doesn't belong to you. It's an unflinching look at the way commercialized sex, particularly when protracted over time with an individual, actually works in places where beautiful, sexy men are also, frequently, conveniently poor. Bravely, the book is in significant part about how commodified sex routinely consumes the consumer, high heresy in contemporary, international gaythink.
There won't be a debate about whether it is a gay novel, despite the indeterminate sexuality of its central character, Mitko, whose name was the title of Greenwell's earlier run at this story, a 2011 novella from Miami University Press. Mitko's sexuality is unclear in terms of preference �" the thing, besides money, that he doesn't have �" and of identity-recognition in his own, unsafe culture. The narrator of Greenwell's new novel goes unnamed, putatively because his American name is "more or less unpronounceable [in Bulgarian]." He is, we learn, a teacher at the American College in Sofia.
We first meet him, however, in a subterranean public toilet, a sepulcher for the walking dead in which timeless, timeworn urban sex rituals play out in an olfactory miasma of metallic water, fermenting urine and cheap booze. He tries to insert himself into "the halting conversation" of a tearoom scrum with what little he can muster of the local slang. The drunken colloquy acquires focus only when the hottest of the guys starts stroking the promising bulge in his jeans. "He rubbed the first three fingers of his other hand together, making the universal sign for money," the narrator notes about the moment when the deal is cinched. "There was nothing in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all: what he offered was a transaction." Minutes into the ensuing sex act (as it can only be called), he adds, "I knew he was performing a desire he didn't feel."
Then, correctively: "I was performing too, pretending to believe that his own show of passion was a genuine response to my own desire, about which there was nothing feigned. As if he sensed these thoughts he pressed me more tightly to him, and for the first time I caught, beneath the more powerful and nearly overwhelming smell of alcohol, his own scent, which would be the source of the pleasure I took from him and which I would seek out (at his neck and crotch, beneath his arms) at each of our meetings."
Despite the exchange of damp bills of a devalued currency, no one exactly scores �" or even, in the strictest sense, gets off �" by the time the scene has played out. But the grinding wheel of shifting domination and ownership has been set in motion. The remainder of the novel that's about the two men re-enacts "how helpless desire is outside the little theater of heat."
The scene is as raw as anything in John Rechy, yet in it and thereafter the writing is almost Jamesian. The grammatical subject of the book's first sentence is a "that" clause, and that particular "that" falsely alleges a personal "betrayal." All the prose that follows is sophisticated, urbane and, despite surface resemblances to the loping, comma-salted, hear-me-sing-without-breathing style of Greenwell's idol Hanya Yanagihara, is more like a novel Henry James might have written had he lived in our time, gotten out more and been candid about it.
It would be a disingenuous pleading of my own case to say that the narrator is a nice guy, but clearly he means to have a culturally sensitive work-adventure in the hinterlands, where of course he will tackle the language first thing, and have a little fun while at it, both with the language and otherwise. What I will say is that any gay expat �" and I've been one in Southeast Asia for 15 years �" will immediately recognize crucial common elements of the scenario. Greenwell provides hundreds but none other so vividly as the prompt colonization of a "host" expat's apartment �" an utterly unconscious but triumphal imposition of a post-imperial dynamic �" by the visiting "guest."
Of the novel's several such events, my favorite is Mitko's first sleepover. Studiously steering events away from the bedroom, and from his persistently clothed crotch, Mitko is immediately all over the host's laptop, listening to local karaoke, Skype-chatting with friends and visiting sex sites where he finds former clients and makes assignations with them and maybe some new ones. Feeling not a little demoralized, the narrator turns to "a slim volume" of (yes!) Cavafy, in the hopes that the words of the poet laureate of sex with the underclass will bring succor.
However: "My fatigue was a kind of agitation now, I kept opening and closing the book I held unread on my lap. I couldn't find what I had found in it before, the recovery of something like nobility from the mawkishness of desire, the sense that stray meetings in dark rooms or the shadowy commerce of my own evening could burn with genuine luminosity, rubbing up against the realm of the ideal, ready at an instant to become metaphysics."
The cost to the soul of mingling sex with commerce has featured in English writing at least since Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" (although plain old unremunerated adultery beats it out every time). But while Greenwell's book clearly falls within a larger literary tradition, its genius is what's unique to it in both content and style. His gift rarer than it should be in writers: the ability to walk not just up to but into and through an experience with eyes and ears, in fact the whole sensorium, open, and the willingness to report back truthfully.
What Belongs to You has far better breeding than Larry Kramer's Faggots , but it has its own way of allowing that love is seldom free, even when paid in full. Only our narrator comes out of this duo wiser. Both men are brought down, if not diminished, but in the end Mitko shuffles off into a likely brief future that will be characterized by nothing so high-minded as tragedy. The poor are always with us, until they are not.
What will startle many readers is that the men become friends of a sort, which is not to say that they almost become friends but that, in their complicated union, they can accuse one another of being friends, just friends or not good-enough friends, all the while intertwined. It's Greenwell at his most eloquent: "He lay like some marine creature wrapped around me, wrapping around me again if I shifted or half woke, and I slept as I have seldom slept, deeply and almost without disturbance, held like his beloved or his child; or held, I suppose it must be said, like his captive or his prey."
"Gift" is another of the book's many leitmotifs. Only too late does our narrator learn that the extraordinary gift he has �" one that a barely comprehending Mitko would have coveted had he even thought it was there for the wanting �" is that the other people in his regular life, like school, know that he is gay and make nothing of it.
While the Mitko timeline is linear, Greenwell shuttles, with no grinding of gears, both back and away in time, to lyrical episodes featuring children who are vital, safe and loved as well as to the horrors of the narrator's own childhood, rendered with as little self-pity as possible while remaining emotionally forthright. I'll be thinking about the boy on the train forever, seeing everywhere the progressively older boys and men he has turned into. It will require no such act of imagination on my part to recall the portrait of the narrator-artist as a young son disowned by his father over an involuntary erection.
We don't get to keep memory, What Belongs to You tells me. It has a mind of its own. Writing alone holds experience in place long enough to explore it, if never completely. In the end, what belongs to you is the book.