Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)

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.

The best and most realistic moments in Greenwell’s novel are those when lives and relationships suddenly pivot and change irreversibly: a violent backhand across the narrator’s face, an innocent boyhood erection deeply unwanted by the person who prompted it, a father’s blunt homophobic rejection of his son. These moments of cruelty arise in the narrative like punches or shocks, fittingly, with a language of precision that re-creates exactly what it feels like to live through such experiences.

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.

Austin Bunn, The Brink (Harper Perennial, 2015)

The arrival of Austin Bunn’s debut book of short stories, The Brink, is certainly well-timed. We’re living in an era of history that feels like it’s always already post-apocalyptic, and that’s exactly what the tightly woven yet loosely worn ten stories in this ambitious and wide-ranging collection are all about. On the book’s opening page, we meet a precocious seventh-grader named Sam, for whom “nuclear holocaust is the only thing worth thinking about,” an obsession with extremity and obliteration that permeates Austin Bunn’s stories, without ever feeling inescapably dark or too heavy-handed. They’re doomsday tales for a generation that grew up training itself, after all, to view doomsday scenarios from a consciously ironic stance.

In addition to being a fiction writer, Bunn is a playwright and filmmaker who wrote the screenplay for 2013’s Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a young Allen Ginsberg. Each story in The Brink has a cinematic sweep and depth; it’s clear that they were written with a filmmaker’s eye, and it’s easy to read them with a moviegoer’s imagination. Sometimes I was reminded of individual films. For instance, “The End of the Age Is Upon Us,” told from the perspective of a young man who’s involved in a cult, recalled the harrowing edginess of 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene. Bunn’s approach to inhabiting his narrator’s sad and brainwashed vision of the world is fully believable and invested throughout.

At times the momentum of the stories reminded me of Alice Munro, who in her best pieces leads her readers to the brink, dangles us over the edge, and then yanks us back up to safety, but never leaving us unchanged after a glimpse of the dangers below. It’s strange to think, therefore, that I also found Bunn’s storytelling style reminiscent of someone like the late John Hughes, whose brilliant and seemingly timeless mid-’80s teen romantic comedies always struck the right balance of drama and sentimentality. A number of these stories show a clear desire to be neatly resolved and self-contained, even in terms of structure, while others end openly or abruptly.

A quality that feels new to fiction, at least for me, is the simulated alternative game-world called the Also in the story titled “Griefer.” The acceleration and velocity of language that Bunn taps into when the central character launches himself into the kinetic strata of the game — in stark contrast to his humdrum everyday life with his wife in their apartment — is similar to the Beat cadences of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, a world drawn with words that zing and dance around on the page: “I zoomed to the edge of the gray-green butte. Below me, the city stretched out on five peninsulas into the ocean, a hand on a mirror. Hundreds of players hived at one of the city terminals. The Also’s composer, a nineteen-year-old kid who made the game sound like a nail salon, was having a live farewell jam. If I boosted my speakers, I could just perceive the twee.”

My favorite story in the collection, and the one that seems most accomplished and realized, is “Ledge.” Set in the age of Christopher Columbus, it’s a seafaring tale about reaching the edge of the Flat Earth, and finding out what’s beyond the precipice. More than mere fantasy, the story is firmly rooted in the long-standing tradition of magical realism, and as such, its tone and dynamic are inherited most directly from Gabriel García Márquez. His own seafaring tales, like “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship,” and “The Sea of Lost Time,” bear an immediate relation to “Ledge,” and Bunn’s story aspires to be as genuinely good as those are.

Narrated by a young man from Seville, who documents the sea journey in his ledger with a quill, it’s one of several stories in the collection (along with “Hazard 9” and “Curious Father”) that unassumingly threads in a gay storyline. In “Ledge” that subplot is even more seamless and unspoken, integrated into the story’s relationships, because anything more demonstrative than that would be anachronistic. The device is both successful and moving, as is the story’s main conceit, of an afterworld that lies beyond the ledge: “Death is the tyranny. To conquer the ledge was a conquest over this. The greed of time.”

The Brink’s virtuosic, trademark aura is situated between the cyberpunk avatars of “Griefer” and the exploration-era atmospherics of “Ledge.” I’d call it Steampunk Lite, and I don’t mean Lite in the sense of hollow imitation. I mean it in the sense that these stories, though obviously influenced by the genre of science fiction, don’t stop there. They’re always totally literary in concept, execution, and scope, which is also what makes them authentic. Their language engages and never shies away from the playful complexity of metaphor. A group of nerdy school kids running in a game rushes around in “a vortex of spaz.” The summit of a mountain looks like “a kneecap rising out of a bath,” and a helicopter landing on bare ground “felt like a pit stop on a hot plate.”

In terms of characters, what all of these stories share is their focus on outsiders. The catalysts for outsiderdom throughout the book are various and diverse: unhappy marriages, infidelity, sheer geekiness, teenage pregnancy and abortion, sexual difference, facial disfigurement following a car crash, assembling an entire battalion of misfits. These are stories about loneliness that have the power to make their readers less lonely.