A review by travisclau
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

5.0

A book I loved for its sincerity, its honesty about some of the most minute aspects of queer identity that isn't spectacularized but made simply a part of every day living. I thought a lot about how the opening of this novel echoed but deviated significantly from Golding's Abomination, which also is about cruising culture and queer space. In so many ways, Greenwell's novel is about similar traumas that have led to particular queer ways of being, but it does not dwell on that kind of hypersexuality. Greenwell meditates on loss and ambivalence that is bound up with unexpected forms of intimacy that are possible because of displacement, circumstance, and barriers to communication. It is sparse in that it describes accurately rather than effusively. This was also one of the first novels I had read in a long time, aside from Yanagihara's A Little Life, that grappled with the queer experience of illness and disability. This is timely -- a reminder in a generation that knows so little about the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 80s and its enduring effects on queer identity and queer relations.