BOOKS THAT BIND US

Garth Greenwell wants you to know his book is gay AND universal, writes Russell Clarke

A debut gay novel and a Cape Flats memoir both have universal relevance

GARTH Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs To You catches one’s eye, not only for the striking jacket but for the shout on the cover, that quotes Hanya Yanagihara: “Language as beautiful and vivid as poetry.”

The shout proves prescient, as Greenwell is a poet by training. His opening salvo, with its taut writing and sheer scale of detail, conveys great depth of emotion.

What Belongs To You is the story of an unnamed American narrator, a teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, and his relationship with Mitko, a rent boy with whom he becomes deeply involved. Divided into three parts, the novel first outlines with frankness how the narrator meets and strikes up a relationship with Mitko, by cruising a bathroom in Sofia’s National Palace of Culture.

The second part, and the heart of the piece, is a 60-page paragraph that follows the narrator as he walks around Sofia contemplating the imminent death of his father and his painful childhood in Kentucky. The last section of the book fast forwards a few years, as the narrator and Mitko are reunited.

Greenwell is unapologetically queer. My first question to him is around how to define the genre of his novel, and how he feels about it being labelled queer fiction, but with a universal set of themes.

He takes delicate umbrage at the question.

“I would say that my only quarrel with how you just characterised the book is the word ‘but’. You know, that it’s a queer novel BUT universal.

“I think that what that does, that word ‘but’, which is a word we all use . . . ‘This is a book about black lives, BUT it’s universal,’ or ‘This is about trans lives, BUT it’s universal,’ and you think, ‘Well, no.’

“There is some kind of human experience that is not marked and characterised by race, gender, class, but by particulars. You know literature is made out of particulars, art is made out of particulars, and I think the weird thing about literature is how it is only through brooding very deeply, as deeply as possible, into particulars, that it arrives at experience that is communicable across all of those categories.

“And it’s a book that I hope is written for queer people, in the sense that I hope it is a book that does not try to take queer lives and package them in a way to make them intelligible, or to make their value intelligible, to people who are antagonistic to queer lives.”

Greenwell is trained in opera, and is a poet, high school teacher and now novelist. The first section of the novel began life as a novella entitled Mitko.

“Mitko was the first fiction I’d ever written, it was the first prose I’d ever written. I’d always read novels voraciously, but never with an eye to craft. I’d always been a poet. When I finished that first section, what would become Mitko, I thought the story was done, I didn’t have any intimation that the story was going to continue.”

A friend suggested he send the piece to the Miami University Press Novella competition, and it won. It also won the Edmund White Debut Fiction award, and a Lambda award. Greenwell describes writing the second part of the book in a “white heat, a harsh, angry emotion”, on scraps of paper.

The last section was workshopped at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, of the TV show Girls fame.

Greenwell’s narrator is very attached to control. He appears to furnish the reader with everything we need to know, but it is in the contradictions that he embodies — desire tinged with fear, disclosure tinged with guardedness, the shifting roles of aggressor and complier (a specific relationship that the rent boy and narrator have) — that we discover that he isn’t really all he presents.

It’s tempting to try to figure out how much a novel reflects an author’s lived experience. “I wrote the book without thinking of myself as a fiction writer, without thinking of it as a novel I was going to publish. I wrote it while I was teaching high school, living in Bulgaria, feeling very isolated.”

It is this sense of isolation, of aloneness, of linguistic alienation that runs throughout the book as a theme — one many queer readers will recognise — a life of being outside, of othering, and this strikingly defines the narrator.

Greenwell is emphatic, though, that the book is a piece of crafted work that does not attempt to be a chronicle of his own life.

‘Literature is made out of particulars’