Mr. Greenwell writes long sentences, pinned at the joints by semicolons, that push forward like confidently searching vines. There’s suppleness and mastery in his voice. He seems to have an inborn ability to cast a spell.
“What Belongs to You is fairly explicitly about shame, punishment, and disgust, among other things. What is unusual is not the presence of these themes but the book’s complicated embrace of 'foulness,' and a barely suppressed longing for punishment, a longing embodied in the narrator’s relationship with Mitko. Greenwell’s novel impresses for many reasons, not least of which is how perfectly it fulfills its intentions.
Stylistically, Greenwell owes more to Sebald than to Nabokov; his long, meditative sentences, which often veer aside into a seemingly unrelated observations, are powered by reflection rather than feeling. One of the great pleasures of his prose is how profoundly thoughtful it is, even when considering physical needs and passions.
This is a novel of aggressive introspection, but Greenwell writes with such candor and psychological precision that the effect is oddly propulsive. The sustained tension between the narrator and Mitko will remind some readers of Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room ... [a] perfect articulation of despair that anyone with a heart will hear.
It’s a compliment to Greenwell’s writing that the vividly written sex scenes are the least compelling aspect of this wonderful book ... What Belongs to You is a rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction because of, not despite, its subject: a gay man’s endeavor to fathom his own heart.
By the end of this short, intense novel it becomes clear that the collision between our hard-won new capacity for frankness and a deep-rooted sense of archaic guilt and grief is precisely Greenwell’s subject.
What Belongs to You is radical and brave not only because it explores gay lives with openness and nuance, but because it does so by avoiding the trappings of a narrative built around gay people aiming for the heterosexual model of life.
Mr. Greenwell is a scrupulous observer of this trajectory, and he describes with sensuous and often unflattering precision the union of shame and desire ... Yet for all the time devoted to it, What Belongs to You is insubstantial, more like a beautifully wrought character portrait than a full-blooded novel.
[an] astonishing debut novel ... Garth Greenwell’s writing is alive to the foreign and the unknown; he opens our eyes to worlds we had not realized existed alongside our own.
At just about 200 pages, What Belongs to You feels at once expansive and instantaneous, and its lyrical use of time is one of its most striking and immersive elements. In any given section, every moment of the book is present ... a haunting, gorgeous, and fierce debut, capturing desire in every sentence—holding the space of what we long for and what can never truly be ours.
The story is compelling in spite of its bareness, compelling enough that, toward the end, I started to resent anything in the outside world that prevented me from continuing to read. You know a book has its grip on you if the world within it is so rich, so exquisitely tense, that you resent the real one for keeping you from it.
What Belongs to You commits itself to revealing how our desires are forged in our early moments of rejection, frustration, and punishment, how even as we grow up and into lives in which we might be free to pursue our desires in whatever form they take, we are never truly free. We do not shape our desires so much as they shape us.
What Belongs to You is a beautiful first book, with a focus on communication, on understanding (or not), often literally, what other people are saying.
Greenwell’s style is both sparse and ornate, focusing on small details but drawing them out endlessly, such as a paragraph-long description of a bus that essentially amounts to, 'The bus was old and cold.' This is not to criticize the syntax, but rather to praise the way Greenwell allows his narrator to conceal his own withholding by having him go on at length about what may as well be nothing.
What Belongs to You is a humorless novel, and I’ve rarely come upon a book, like this one, about which it can be said that humorlessness is not a defect but an aesthetic necessity.
