What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell’s powerful and heart-rending debut novel, often seems
to inhabit an earlier era. Take out the cell phones and laptop Skype sessions, and
this story of an American expatriate teacher and his ongoing, tumultuous
encounters with a Bulgarian hustler named Mitko would feel like something that
Rimbaud and Verlaine might have experienced in their own place and time. While
there’s plenty of redemption to be found in the book, it’s also relentlessly
and unapologetically austere in stretches, both in its intentionally spare
narrative movement and its explorations of the cities and landscapes of
Bulgaria.
But overall, What Belongs to You
is far more dedicated to exploring the inner lives of its characters, which is
to say that it’s a novel about human relationships, about our troubling,
visceral connections and inevitable disconnections. So much of the book depends
on Mitko’s magnetism — for the novel to succeed, we have to feel as compelled
by him as the narrator is — and Greenwell draws him as an enticing and
ultimately unforgettable personality. This is not an easy task for any writer
to accomplish. The author honed the first of the novel’s three sections from
his 2011 novella that focused on the same two characters; from the moment Mitko
first appears, cruising alongside the narrator in the basement bathroom of
Sofia’s National Palace of Culture, his aura is equally riveting in this longer
book.
Greenwell’s prose is long-limbed and ambitious. His paragraphs span two
or three pages at times, and the novel’s experimental second section is a
single paragraph that unwinds for over forty pages. It’s not only a way of
immersing the reader in the narrator’s thoughts and descriptions, but also of
leveling down the high-risk subject matter. As long as we’re caught up in the
writing itself, then there’s no chance to judge or second-guess the action.
We’re implicated in what’s happening as much as the narrator is himself, as the
sporadic storms of Mitko’s attention drift (or jolt) in and out of the
narrator’s daily world.
Part of what makes Mitko’s mystery lodge in the reader’s mind is how
little of his past we’re shown. Early in the novel, when the narrator invites
Mitko back to his apartment, Mitko scrolls through photographs of his younger
self on a website. Although the pictures were taken only a couple of years
earlier, “I was shocked by the difference in their faces, the man in the image
and the man beside me,” the narrator thinks; “he looked like a nice kid, a kid
I might have had in class at the prestigious school where I teach.” How far
Mitko had fallen after turning to a life of drinking, prostitution, and
homelessness pulls the narrator closer to his dangerous orbit, deepening the
desire to possess and understand him, and creating a divide that will become
impossible for Mitko to cross. After tagging along with the narrator and one of
his friends for dinner, Mitko says, “I want to live a normal life,” before holding
out his hand for money as they part ways.
What exactly makes a normal life? For most people, it’s money and
routine work, which Mitko never has and seemed destined not to have. Love is a
key ingredient, too, for those who are lucky enough to find it, or have it
bestowed upon them by their families. “Normal” might also mean “moral” in this
instance. Yet one of the great strengths of Greenwell’s book is its lack of
judgment where morality is concerned. In the universe of his novel, it’s more
important to document whatever occurs, to show the way the world is, which
grants his writing a kind of lapidary realism as well as psychological
intensity.
Although I’ll avoid giving away any plot details, I will say that the
final fifty pages of the book, which I’d saved until I was ready to read them,
are pure art, a feat made possible by the careful intricacy of everything
that’s come before. I read them straight through to the end. The words were
often blurred with tears, and I was grateful to be moved.