Book Reivew: What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

★★★★★

A middle aged American teaching history in Bulgaria hooks up with a young hustler, Mitko, in a public restroom, and he pays Mitko for sex. The teacher finds himself drawn again and again to Mitko over the following months, until he is ensnared in a relationship where lust leads to pain and resentment, feelings are one-sided, and each new tenderness comes with a higher price.

What Belongs to You is an exquisite debut novel of middle-aged desire and its consequences. About reaching for something that you can never really possess. It is a story about how our needs, our scars, and our shame shape who we love, but more importantly, who we are.

At first, this novel seemed like a cliché setup I’d read many, many times. And indeed the plot is well-worn.  However, the prose has such lyric intensity and the story holds such staggering eroticism without becoming erotica, that I became enthralled. It is an intense study of two very different people, and the author skillfully takes the reader deeper and deeper into each character, until you feel you know them inside and out, because they share so many genuine human emotions as the reader.

Greenwell has created an indelible story, a masterpiece that will stand long after other contemporary works are forgotten.