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The follow-up to Garth Greenwell’s much-acclaimed debut novel encompasses the tender and the tawdry in exhilarating prose
Garth Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs to You was a spare, spellbinding account of an American academic’s intense desire for a rent boy in post-Soviet Bulgaria. It received a lot of attention for a book set in the public loos of Sofia. It won the British book award for debut of the year, and no fewer than 50 publications across nine countries named it best book of the year.
And rightly so. Written in gorgeously limpid prose, it was fearless and nerve-racking autobiographical fiction, incandescent with yearning, rage and rejection. But it was the middle section, about the molten anguish of growing up gay with a Republican father in Kentucky, that had me gripped. Written in one supple, unbroken paragraph of 40 pages, it remains one of the most heartbreaking accounts of pained desire that I can remember reading. The novel is worthy of its comparisons to James Baldwin and Alan Hollinghurst as well as Virginia Woolf and WG Sebald. Continue reading...