Garth Greenwell wrote a book that makes you feel like you’re trespassing. It’s called What Belongs to You. If you haven't read it, you've probably at least seen that iconic, minimalist cover—the one with the yellow and the blurred figure—staring at you from the "Staff Picks" shelf at every indie bookstore for the last several years. It isn’t just a "queer novel" or a "debut." Honestly, it’s an excavation of how much we’re willing to pay for a moment of connection that we know, deep down, is going to cost us everything.
The story is deceptively simple. An American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria, meets a young hustler named Mitko in a public bathroom. That’s it. That’s the spark. But what follows isn't some cheap thriller or a standard romance. It is a dense, lyrical, and sometimes painful exploration of obsession. Greenwell doesn't give you easy answers. He doesn't even give you traditional paragraph breaks half the time. He just gives you the raw, unvarnished truth of what it feels like to want someone you can't actually have.
The Mitko Problem
Mitko is a force of nature. He’s charismatic, volatile, and deeply troubled. When the narrator meets him, there is an immediate power imbalance that Greenwell refuses to look away from. It’s uncomfortable. You’re sitting there reading, and you want to scream at the narrator to just walk away, but you can’t. You're trapped in his head.
The book is split into three distinct movements. The first part, "Mitko," introduces us to this transactional relationship. Is it love? Is it exploitation? It’s probably both, and that’s what makes What Belongs to You so incredibly sticky in your brain. Greenwell captures the specific grime of Sofia—the crumbling Soviet-era architecture, the cold, the sense of a place caught between its past and a future that hasn't quite arrived yet. It’s the perfect backdrop for a story about people who feel stuck.
The middle section, "A Grave," takes a hard left turn. We leave Bulgaria and go back to the narrator’s childhood in Kentucky. This is where the book proves it’s more than just a story about a tawdry affair. It’s about the lineage of shame. Greenwell writes about the narrator’s father with a precision that feels like a scalpel. You realize that the narrator’s obsession with Mitko isn’t just about Mitko; it’s about a lifetime of trying to find a place where he belongs. It’s about the trauma of being a gay kid in a place that didn't want him.
Why the Prose Matters More Than the Plot
If you're looking for a fast-paced beach read, this isn't it. Greenwell uses long, winding sentences. They sprawl. They loop back on themselves. Sometimes a single sentence will take up half a page. It mirrors the way we actually think when we're obsessed with someone—the way our minds circle the same drain over and over.
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- The rhythm is hypnotic.
- The vocabulary is elevated but never feels pretentious.
- There is a tactile quality to the writing; you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and the damp air of the National Palace of Culture.
Some critics, like James Wood in The New Yorker, have pointed out that Greenwell belongs to a tradition of "high style" writers like W.G. Sebald or Thomas Bernhard. But there’s an emotional vulnerability here that those writers sometimes lack. Greenwell isn't hiding behind his intellect. He’s using it to strip himself bare.
The Dynamics of Desire
Let’s talk about the money. Money is everywhere in this book. Every time Mitko and the narrator meet, there’s an exchange. It’s a transaction. But Greenwell complicates this by showing how the narrator uses his relative wealth as a shield. He thinks he’s the one in control because he’s the one paying, but Mitko is the one who holds all the emotional cards.
It’s a power struggle where nobody really wins. Mitko is dying—not literally (at least not at first), but he’s fading. He’s losing his health, his looks, his youth. The narrator is watching this decline with a mix of horror and a weird, selfish kind of grief. He wants to save Mitko, but he also wants to own him. The title, What Belongs to You, is a question as much as it is a statement. What do we actually own in another person? Can we ever really possess someone else’s pain?
Honestly, the ending of the book is one of the most devastating things I’ve read in years. It doesn't provide a neat bow. It just leaves you standing in the cold, much like the characters themselves.
The Cultural Impact of What Belongs to You
Since its release in 2016, the book has become a touchstone for contemporary literature. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, and for good reason. It pushed the boundaries of what "gay literature" could be. It wasn't interested in a "coming out" story or a "happily ever after." It was interested in the messy, dark, complicated reality of adult life.
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It’s also worth noting how the book handles the setting. Bulgaria isn't just a "foreign" backdrop used for flavor. Greenwell lived there for years as a teacher, and it shows. He captures the nuances of the language, the social hierarchies, and the specific kind of melancholy that hangs over Eastern Europe. He avoids the "poverty porn" trap by focusing on the specific humanity of the people he encounters.
Key Themes to Look For:
- Shame and its endurance: How the things we were told about ourselves as children follow us into our beds as adults.
- The Transactional Nature of Intimacy: Is any relationship truly free of exchange?
- The Body as a Map: How we carry our history in our physical selves.
- Language Barriers: The gap between what we say and what we mean, especially when speaking a second language.
Many people compare this book to Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. The comparison is fair. Both books deal with American men abroad, navigating their desires in a world that feels both liberating and suffocating. But Greenwell’s work feels more modern, more attuned to the specific ways that capitalism and class infect our private lives today.
Practical Insights for the Reader
If you’re planning on picking up What Belongs to You, don't rush it. This is a book that demands your full attention. You can’t skim it. If you skim, you’ll miss the subtle shifts in tone that make the story work.
First, pay attention to the setting. If you can, look up photos of Sofia and the National Palace of Culture (NDK). Having a visual of that brutalist architecture helps ground the story. Second, don't judge the narrator too harshly. It’s easy to see his choices as "stupid" or "pathetic," but Greenwell is asking us to look at the parts of ourselves that are also stupid and pathetic. He’s asking for empathy, not just for the victim, but for the person making the mess.
Finally, read it for the sentences. Even if you don't care about the plot, the way Greenwell puts words together is a masterclass in craft.
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Next Steps for Fans of the Book
If you've finished the book and you're sitting there in a daze, wondering what to do next, here are a few ways to dig deeper.
Read Cleanness. This is Greenwell’s follow-up, and while it’s technically a collection of linked stories, it feels like a spiritual sequel. It returns to Sofia and explores many of the same themes but with a different structural approach. It’s just as intense, if not more so.
Check out the work of Pedro Almodóvar. While his films are often more colorful and manic, he shares Greenwell’s obsession with desire, the past, and the ways we perform our identities. Specifically, Pain and Glory feels like it exists in the same emotional universe.
Explore the poetry of Frank Bidart. Greenwell is a poet by training, and you can see Bidart’s influence in the way he handles dramatic monologues and the "sculpting" of desire on the page.
Listen to interviews with Garth Greenwell. He is an incredibly articulate speaker who talks about "the lyric" and the "long sentence" in a way that will make you appreciate the technical side of the book even more. He often discusses how he wanted to write a book that felt like music.
What Belongs to You isn't a book you "get through." It's a book that gets through you. It stays in your system like a low-grade fever. It’s a reminder that literature doesn't have to be "likable" to be essential. Sometimes, the most important books are the ones that make us the most uncomfortable.