A dull day in the Sofia classroom is interrupted by a knock on the door, a woman enters clutching a single piece of paper, and we begin to learn just why this particular narrator is who he is. In the second part of the book’s triptych the narrative makes a sudden turn into heavy oncoming emotional traffic. Then, however, things get a lot more interesting. Nevertheless I found it hard to believe the narrator’s implicit claims that his mutually exploitative relationship with Mitko provided any sort of model for more general workings of desire. 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 true, is a powerful one. 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 unhappy queer narrator.

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.

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, just as Greenwell himself once did. By the end of this short, intense novel it becomes clear that the collision between our hard-won new capacity for frankness and a deep-rooted sense of archaic guilt and grief is precisely Greenwell’s subject. 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 gay men do best – at times I felt as if I was reading an updated, gender-swapped rewrite of La Prisonnière.

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 detached, carefully styled literary brutalism that feels very of the moment however, the emotional geography of the story could have come straight from Proust. Poet and critic Garth Greenwell’s first full-length novel, which arrives this side of the Atlantic loaded with praise, is a fine example of this creative double-bind. 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.

C ontemporary male queer fiction is in a strange place.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell