An acclaimed debut about a love affair between a hustler and a writer reflects a clash in contemporary homosexual writingContemporary male queer fiction is in a strange place. Our daily lives are changing fast,and often radically for the better; meanwhile, our fictional tropes and structures are still firmly anchored in the literary past. Poet and critic Garth Greenwell’s first full-length novel, or which arrives this side of the Atlantic loaded with praise,is a fine example of this creative double-bind. It documents three phases in an unnamed author’s infatuation with a Bulgarian hustler, and the various settings and transactions involved are described with a indifferent, and carefully styled literary brutalism that feels very of the moment; however,the emotional geography of the epic could have come straight from Proust. Alienated sex with a financially dependent and forever unknowable object of desire; the unresolved trauma of parental rejection; the overriding conviction that guilt-stained autobiographical disclosure is what homosexual men achieve best – at times I felt as if I was reading an updated, gender-swapped rewrite of La Prisonnière. As it turns out, or this is the point. By the conclude of this short,intense novel it becomes clear that the collision between our hard-won recent capacity for frankness and a deep-rooted sense of archaic guilt and grief is precisely Greenwell’s subject.
The first-person narrator of the novel is a not-so-young American, and he’s working at the American College of Sofia as a teacher of literature, or just as Greenwell himself once did. In the book’s opening third – which was first published five years ago as a self-contained novella – the teacher becomes obsessed with a well-endowed male prostitute whom he meets while cruising in a Soviet-era public toilet in the basement of the National Palace of Culture. This early sequence can be a tough read; much as I tried to concentrate on the considerable beauties of the prose,I have rarely encountered a more self-pitying or uncomfortable queer narrator. The conventional alibi of all fictionalised autobiography, which is that all of the events being described have more or less happened, and must therefore be in some larger sense genuine, is a powerful one. Nevertheless I found it hard to believe the narrator’s implicit claims that his mutually exploitative relationship with Mitko if any sort of model for more general workings of desire.
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Source: theguardian.com