Garth Greenwell

A Novel

What Belongs to You

I read Greenwell’s debut novel back in 2018 during the budding years of my undergraduate life. I pirated an e-copy of it on my laptop, transferred it to my phone, and read it there since it was a more portable medium. After I had read the book, what remained to me were the grand, and often vehement, intimacies between the characters brought forward by Greenwell’s beautiful language. I remember being stopped by this sentence: “I lay next to him thinking, as I had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat.” Here, Greenwell painfully captures the coldness and longing within negotiated relationships, and his unique way of bringing words together is something aspirational. At the time, I knew I was holding a beautiful book even if I had little grasp of what makes “good” literature. Now I came back to this book as a physical copy (thank you Librodega), and I was eager to read it again because I have grown as a person, and I could probably view this book from a new vantage, one that was not afforded to me when I was a meek preadult. 

This novel is STILL beautifully disgusting, Shakespearian in its tragedy, and bold at best. We have an unnamed narrator who is a young American gay man teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. He meets a charismatic young hustler named Mitko who accepts payments in exchange for sex. From there, the novel dissects their dynamic, and in the process, also deconstructs desirability, body politics, power play, and trauma. 

There is this fragmented Gilles Deleuze quote that I think works best to describe the whole novel: “Power demands sad bodies. Power needs sadness because it can dominate it.” From the start, we see the desperateness of Mitko as he bargains sex for a few leva (Bulgarian currency), coasting public bathrooms to sight potential customers. We then learn that Mitko grew up in a destitute household, and had a history of selling his body through any means that would get him money. This sad position of Mitko is seized by our narrator whose money and privilege grant him a power of his own. “It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available,” the narrator says in fascination. This economic disparity between them has predestined the succeeding interactions as one-sided, inauthentic, and transactional -- and with this comes Mitko’s power. Our narrator is also a sad body, but unlike Mitko, his poverty is not found in tangible things; his poverty is love. His obsession over Mitko is what makes him subservient: always there to accommodate Mitko’s violent outbursts, always there to spit some money, always there to exhibit love but not getting anything in return. This complicated dynamic is what makes Greenwell’s fiction so nuanced because it’s a relationship that could have been ripped from real life, and with the selfish first-person narrative, I might even contend that this could be autobiographical. 

“What Belongs To You” toys with the idea of ownership, and how in this system, our bodies could be commodified to satisfy those with deep pockets. We could ascribe a predatory label to our narrator for using his position as a leverage over Mitko, but Greenwell does not care about having likable characters; in fact, he published a daring piece about morality in fiction, citing Nabokov’s Lolita as a prime example of how you can have a problematic main character be divorced from the genius or reality. For him, “the task of art isn’t to judge, but to know, to observe, to carry out research into the human.” The idea seems romantic, but I definitely agree that there should be space for challenging art, one that does not grant us easy access to righteousness. We can have problematic characters like the narrator and Mitko, but this does not mean that they are exemplary, they’re just real. 

This was my introduction to queer fiction, and from when I read this, I was only 18 years old, cramped in the wooden bed of my boarding house, still closeted and quietly queer. This book made me understood how love is so transactional for us gay people, and that "transactional" aspect of it comes from our uneven status, produced by an uneven society

Kent Reymark Tocayon

I read Greenwell’s debut novel back in 2018 during the budding years of my undergraduate life. I pirated an e-copy of it on my laptop, transferred it to my phone, and read it there since it was a more portable medium. After I had read the book, what remained to me were the grand, and often vehement, intimacies between the characters brought forward by Greenwell’s beautiful language. I remember being stopped by this sentence: “I lay next to him thinking, as I had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat.” Here, Greenwell painfully captures the coldness and longing within negotiated relationships, and his unique way of bringing words together is something aspirational. At the time, I knew I was holding a beautiful book even if I had little grasp of what makes “good” literature. Now I came back to this book as a physical copy (thank you Librodega), and I was eager to read it again because I have grown as a person, and I could probably view this book from a new vantage, one that was not afforded to me when I was a meek preadult. 

This novel is STILL beautifully disgusting, Shakespearian in its tragedy, and bold at best. We have an unnamed narrator who is a young American gay man teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. He meets a charismatic young hustler named Mitko who accepts payments in exchange for sex. From there, the novel dissects their dynamic, and in the process, also deconstructs desirability, body politics, power play, and trauma. 

There is this fragmented Gilles Deleuze quote that I think works best to describe the whole novel: “Power demands sad bodies. Power needs sadness because it can dominate it.” From the start, we see the desperateness of Mitko as he bargains sex for a few leva (Bulgarian currency), coasting public bathrooms to sight potential customers. We then learn that Mitko grew up in a destitute household, and had a history of selling his body through any means that would get him money. This sad position of Mitko is seized by our narrator whose money and privilege grant him a power of his own. “It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available,” the narrator says in fascination. This economic disparity between them has predestined the succeeding interactions as one-sided, inauthentic, and transactional -- and with this comes Mitko’s power. Our narrator is also a sad body, but unlike Mitko, his poverty is not found in tangible things; his poverty is love. His obsession over Mitko is what makes him subservient: always there to accommodate Mitko’s violent outbursts, always there to spit some money, always there to exhibit love but not getting anything in return. This complicated dynamic is what makes Greenwell’s fiction so nuanced because it’s a relationship that could have been ripped from real life, and with the selfish first-person narrative, I might even contend that this could be autobiographical. 

“What Belongs To You” toys with the idea of ownership, and how in this system, our bodies could be commodified to satisfy those with deep pockets. We could ascribe a predatory label to our narrator for using his position as a leverage over Mitko, but Greenwell does not care about having likable characters; in fact, he published a daring piece about morality in fiction, citing Nabokov’s Lolita as a prime example of how you can have a problematic main character be divorced from the genius or reality. For him, “the task of art isn’t to judge, but to know, to observe, to carry out research into the human.” The idea seems romantic, but I definitely agree that there should be space for challenging art, one that does not grant us easy access to righteousness. We can have problematic characters like the narrator and Mitko, but this does not mean that they are exemplary, they’re just real. 

This was my introduction to queer fiction, and from when I read this, I was only 18 years old, cramped in the wooden bed of my boarding house, still closeted and quietly queer. This book made me understood how love is so transactional for us gay people, and that "transactional" aspect of it comes from our uneven status, produced by an uneven society

What Belongs to You A Novel

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