It's idle but tempting to speculate what would have been the effect on the writing and reception of Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You if every publisher in London had not, a decade ago, rejected Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart, just released for the first time in the US (Norton). What the two novels share, though Mukherjee does not lead with it, is a stark evocation of gay male public-bathroom sex. At least in Greenwell's case, the reading and book-buying public of all genders has found this titillating.
It had been thought by some, hoped by others, that mention of this timeless, borderless zone of urban gay life, with its tensions, longueurs and bad smells, had been consigned to the pre-gay-matrimonial past by the hookup apps that now put casual (as if it were) gay sex back where it belongs, behind the closed bedroom doors of promiscuous gay men. As they say in app world, Ha!
By comparison with Mukherjee's, Greenwell's view of tearoom trade can seem like so much pixilated Japanese porn. The Calcutta-born writer, shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his second novel The Lives of Others, has inserted into his first �" like Greenwell's, a novel about weightier things �" an entire epistemology of the pissoir, and alumni will recognize the complete syllabus. Where Greenwell celebrates, Mukherjee looks on with a more natural-scientific, taxonomy-oriented eye at the manners and mores of "cottaging" (in British Empire nomenclature), though hardly without feeling. He has brought it up for a reason. The reason, it turns out to no one's surprise, is Mother.
"On nights when the sound of footfalls becomes few and far between, he sits there and thinks of his mother and the lost innocence of the word 'abuse.' At other times he just sits away the hours in his cubicle thinking, 'What would you think if you saw me now? This , this stench of urine and disinfectant and cock, this is what I am, not what you wanted me to be.' And he punishes her more by staying on another extra hour when he knows there won't be anyone else visiting the public toilets that night."
We meet Ritwik Ghosh, an unbeliever quickly perceiving that he is not alone in that or much else, attending to the chaotic Calcutta cremation ceremony for his mother. He senses through the ashes and "the dark slurry of putrefying matter which is the Ganges" that to be an orphan may also be the starting block to freedom, not from a cycle of endless rebirths but from the endless trials of this life, now that Ritwik is responsible for a deadbeat family as stagnant as the Ganges delta.
We shortly learn that his mother, in a manifestation of parental love the neighbors can't get enough of, has beaten him senseless over every behavioral infraction, stopping only when he is curled up into a foetal ball, to "straighten him out so that she could have greater access to his body." For kicking. From wooden ruler or belt, "The fiery flowers bloomed rapidly across his legs his thighs his back his scalp." "Whenever she punished him physically, she came into a new being. It could only be called blossoming, as though all the forces in her, concentrated so far in a tight bud, had suddenly unfurled in a terrible beauty."
The orphaned Ritwik escapes to England for higher education in English literature and anonymous sex in all its varieties. At the peak or nadir of his compulsive, escape-based cottaging, Ritwik has become both an expert and a connoisseur, marveling at toilet-stall graffiti that translates a famous Gerard Manley Hopkins metaphysical poem into "Batter my arse, three persons at the door." It is "an addiction," "a habit," "a thrill," with a fear of discovery �" arrest �" at its core.
There's more in store for Ritwik when he leaves Oxford, and with it his official identity as an actual person in England. There's street-walking (casually and almost without premeditation, but dangerously, as an independent, without a mafia boss) and being kept by a fabulously rich Saudi, none of which makes for a boring story, at least in Mukherjee's telling. But what makes this book so astonishingly rich is the fabulist's way both Ritwik and his creator escape the escapes. Returning from his first foray into "street" sex, Ritwik is visited by a memory of a Miss Gilby, a minor character with a three-minute walk-on in a Bengali film, Gharey Biarey . "What if he told her story?"
This would hardly be a 21st-century first novel if someone in it were not writing a novel, but instead of that being something merely stated, Mukherjee gives us Ritwik's novel, as compellingly about Partition in Bengal in the waning days of the Raj as it is about the now-remarkable Miss Gilby, interleaved with the chapters of Ritwik's present-day story.
Mukherjee turns out to be a master of plot with no need to devise a juggernaut of a postmodern "pluzzle" when instead he can weave three distinct plot-lines, all of them charged with suspense but none of them a head-scratcher. In a final measure of writerly guts, he makes the story-lines converge satisfyingly �" and yes, tragically �" at the end. Birds are a big deal, and books about Indian ornithology, particularly the ones by turn-of-the-century Violet Cameron.
You could pull every character in this novel off a lineup, but you won't soon be forgetting Anne Cameron, who gives Ritwik free board in exchange for caring for her in her altogether fascinating dotage. In the bath, "Anne is a submerged bird, a creature of hollowness, all air and insubstantiality, the broken doll of her body accentuated grotesquely by the way the bath water reflects her limbs and shriveled dugs and torso into slightly skewed sizes and perspectives." She's the real thing as a crone, pissing into her sofa �" "the hot, comforting trickle, the gathering wetness under and around her like a leaking amniotic sac" �" and stashing gin. And she has a cat, Ugo. But like a Norn in Wagner's Ring, she draws into her pithy being everyone's stories, including, in devastating fragments, that of her gay son Richard, who blew his brains out in the very room in which Ritwik stays.
I'd be remiss telling more. What kept happening to me as I followed the saga of Ritwik Ghosh, young and slight of frame, was experiencing anew the steady stripping away of innocence from a soul that never had the childhood variety in the first place. In adventure after Dickensian misadventure, what otherwise might be called "pure experience" �" particularly of violence of all kinds, and moments of redemption just frequent enough �" Ritwik is dragged kicking and screaming into the nightmare of real adult life. There have been few books I could not put down. A Life Apart is one.