A review by whogivesabook
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

3.0

Let's get one thing straight, the writing itself is technically brilliant and very engaging. It stirs you up inside. The slight failure here is that sometimes it stirs you up a little too much. I especially loved the train scene. It managed to present me with a character that I felt like I knew well, despite knowing so little about him. A sign of great writing. To give you a sense of a person with one small scrap of them showing. You learn to intuit them.

So that I don't ruin this one for anyone, I'll put this little advance warning. It isn't a major plot point really, so the rest of the story remains unblemished. This criticism will tackle something halfway through the book though, so be mindful.

The main character is told to get checked by someone. He gets checked. The author makes the diagnosis very negative and serious. This felt really disproportionate to me. In fact, it felt a little problematic. Because if you gear up one illness to the place of another, you devalue the worse one. In this case. Here it is. The author describes the devastating impact of a diagnosis of gonorrhoea. But it's lingered over and preempted to the point of farce. It feels like this diagnosis is HIV. It feels like the story might slide in that direction. But even when it is clearly just gonorrhoea, it still has this really unsettling poignancy. It feels disrespectful. And don't think that I mean poignant in a purposeful and interesting way. I mean it's like getting really emotionally expressive about a broken toe... to a point where if you had a leg amputated, you'd tell them to get a grip.

That aspect ruined this book for me. It's a massive shame too. The story was a 4. The writing style was a 5. Characterisation was a 4. But that single aspect... for me... Leaves this one at a 3.

I've bought the authors second book Cleanness. So hopefully that's better.