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The bureaucratic rigmarole the narrator has to endure after Mitko tells him he has syphilis and that he should go get tested seems almost explicitly designed to humiliate the narrator, involving multiple clinics, a paucity of treatment options, and a female medical professional who acts surprised or disappointed when the narrator doesn't fall apart upon hearing the news he does indeed have syphilis, "as if she had been cheated of an intended effect."
From Mitko, the narrator contracts that most literary of diseases: syphilis. Just as the relative killed by the wrench was punished over a perceived sexual transgression, so the narrator of What Belongs to You is punished for the sexual transgression of going home with the hustler. The wrench had been sitting on an engine and was red-hot, and the killer's hand was "always a little bit curled" after that-again with the facts of the physical world melting around the heat of someone's feeling. This explains the hyperbolic or melodramatic use of verbs how could you write about excesses of desire if the language didn't reflect those excesses?īefore you know it, you're in a verbal vortex, one of the most intense rhetorical gambits of the book, a forty-one-page paragraph that includes the narrator getting an erection while showering with his dad and, later, another relative being beaten to death with a wrench. Physical reality seems to melt around the novel's hot core of feeling. For all its attempts to get outdoors (the sea, a hike, train rides), it is a novel most compelling at its most interior. The novel is explicitly set in Bulgaria, but implicitly it is set on the staging ground of intensity itself. These "little theaters of heat," these packets of desire or panic or imminence, these doublings-down of doubt and upswellings of confidence-these concentrations of feeling are Greenwell's subject. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. And when I asked him what was wrong he just shrugged and answered that he had already had sex that afternoon, which seemed like a breach of contract, though I suppose I had no real basis for complaint.