What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

The unnamed narrator observes a girl with her father. She challenges herself to lean closer and closer to the river; she doesn’t know that she can’t fall in, since her father’s arm is wrapped around her. She reaches too far out and scares herself, throws herself back to her father’s body, embracing it, knowing that he is safe, and that by being with him—a part of him—she is safe, too. Only then did she laugh, with her father’s body folded around her […] so certain it seemed of a home among the things of the world. They embraced for a long time […] an intimacy confident of absolute possession.

What belongs to you? What is belonging? You belong to me, love can be cute like that. The word is uncomfortable—to belong is to possess, to be possessed is to surrender one’s agency. Or, to belong is a state where subject and subject merge into a kind of Platonic being—to be one with another person, another cliché. To belong is to fit.

Belonging is what Garth Greenwell explores throughout his masterpiece of a novel. It is a negotiation with the foreign Other, Mitko, who understands love as a series of transactions—but what starts as a sexual transaction unfolds into something deeper, fraught, unsatisfying as economic, social, ideological and linguistic gulfs separate the men, frustrate their attempts to understand each other. Mitko will always be ungraspable; he becomes an obsession. Belonging is also the narrator’s reckoning with his self, his past: his incredibly traumatic rejection by his family and best friend, the agony of vindicating his existence, reclaiming the freedom to just be.

The novel is also an exercise in psychogeography: the ways in which belonging—if it is indeed possible to belong to a person, to a place - changes the way one moves and reads one’s environment. In homophobic Sofia, love and desire exist and thrive in limited, constraining spaces, which in turn magnify their erotic pulse, threatening to burst. There’s a brilliant moment at the start of the novel when Mitko—whose animated, excessive self reminds me of William Beckwith and Walt Whitman—is cruising in the National Palace of Culture’s public toilets. Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon. These treasured refuges—toilets, chatrooms, hotel rooms—are not enough, however. Mitko—underground hustler, nightwalker—suffocates: he associates homosexuality with depravity, feels like he is damned on earth and by God. Homophobia is killing Bulgaria’s youth.

Greenwell will wreck you in the best way: exquisite creation of character, from the unnamed narrator to the child on the train. They are triumphs, cinematic—you can see them move, their body language so perfectly described you would think he was transcribing scenes in high style from flawless memory. You see the influences in his prose—Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Baldwin—and how he’s inscribed himself into their legacy.

Picador