What Belongs to You A Novel

This novel is a devastating, intimate chronology that reads like a journal. It’s suffocating in the best way as there’s no way to escape the emotions this draws out of you. It’s more about people and circumstance than events, a character study.

beautifully written with a good structure and sequence

I adored both What Belongs to You and Cleanness, reading them as extensions of one another. WBTY represents fully the machinations of shame, grief, innocence and jealousy; is brave in its confrontation of emotional roundness—and this honesty brings a startling level of privacy to Greenwell's work. I also love his style: In meandering, measured sentences, Greenwell dilates time, shifting between the present and memory and interiority to propel the emotional narrative forward. I still don't know if I really understand how he does it. He's the kind of writer I want to be.

insane control over his prose, such gloss in the sex scenes; tenderness

This novel has some brilliant writing and a heartbreaking ending which moved me to tears.

This was a quiet, deeply introspective novel that felt uncomfortable and claustrophobic, probably intentionally. Greenwell's writing ached with such brutal honesty that the book became difficult to read at times. I admire the language, the stark human truths unearthed in its prose, but I don't think it makes up for a plot that meandered to the point of not going anywhere and the general impatience and lack of sympathy I felt towards an ostensibly privileged, white, American, male protagonist who, I felt, refused any agency or did anything to drive the story, except maybe at the very end. I understand that his backstory informs the reader of why he is the way he is, but I thought that the power dynamic between him and Mitko was still very much tilted in the former's favor, despite his obsession with the latter. Still, there were some soft, quiet moments in the novel that were very memorable.

I really came to enjoy this book by the end. I think what sold it for me, was the flashbacks in the main characters life - where you learn about how he learned how to think of himself. I felt for much of it as though this was an exercise in extending a thought - a vignette - beyond a short story. But by the end, I really enjoyed it. And I think I began to understand what was being said, and unsaid. I think I won't know what I think about this book for a while. It felt a little too long, but at times I really enjoyed the pace Greenwell took in examining small things. I don't know that this is a book for everyone, but it certainly got me hooked by the end, and I'll be thinking about it for a while to come.