Garth Greenwell

CW: non-con, under-negotiated kink, ignoring a safeword, shame, attempted/near-rape, ignoring SSC/risk-aware kink practices with abandon and ignorance. Probably more? I dunno. It was a lot. Of stories. And kink. Just. Be careful and take care of you while reading this.

*drums fingers* So. In general, I am not the biggest fan of short stories. They just tend not to be my bag. I've also been reading, very deliberately, about human sexuality, including kink, in both fiction and nonfiction, in show more both traditionally published and nontraditionally published forms, for my entire adult life. So I'd say I both was and was not the audience for this anthology of short stories all having something to do with kink. Do with that information what you will when I say that I really, really didn't care for it.

A handful of the stories here, while I might not have loved them, I thought were doing something really interesting and were successful as examples of the form. (I'll list at the end of my review which ones those were.) And I think the whole anthology suffered from the framing it was given, from being packaged in this book with this black cover with the forbidding red "Kink" as a title and from coming under a two-page introduction from the editors that makes claims of providing something needed and new in this collection ("a book like this hasn't been published in a long time") but fails to make any real argument as to why we do or to prove that we don't already have it. The introduction ignores (or worse (?), is unaware of) the vast array of kink writing in fiction that has been happening in fandom spaces, in romance, and, yes, in long-form literary fiction for... well, forever, really. The introduction, which points to the editors' desire to produce "the kind of book that could sit on artists' residencies' library shelves" and wants to push back against a perceived "flattening" and "simplification" of kink in popular culture, including popular books*, reads like the worst kind of elitist nonsense. There is so much good writing out there already about this subject. Is there room for more? Of course! Is there room for an anthology of literary short stories on this subject? Of course! Is it good to have writing on this subject in all manner of genres, including literary fiction? Of course! But this suggestion that this anthology has finally given us something that was just tragically missing before, that it has rolled in and filled some kind hole that desperately needed filling, seriously chapped my ass. (Heh.) So. Are there some stories in here that I might have been happier about if I had come across them in a magazine or a collection of an author's work or some other anthology? Yeah, maybe. 'Cause after that intro, I went in mad.

Now, as to the stories themselves. Always, always, in an anthology, some things will float your boat while others don't. For sure that was the case for me here. But I genuinely didn't *really* like any of them. And some of that is the literary-short-story-ness of them. No judgement. (Okay, mild judgement. But only mild!). This genre (it *is* a genre, with conventions and expectations and weaknesses, just like any other) just isn't the genre that really rolls down my socks. But on the whole, there's an awful lot of miscommunication and shame and obfuscation in these stories. And very little of that miscommunication and obfuscation and shame gets resolved or cleared up or transformed into self-acceptance. And, fair? I guess? I mean, it's not romance. No one promised me any happy endings. And it's not terribly fair to judge any one of these stories about miscommunication or obfuscation or shame just because it happens to be in company with fifteen others also about those things. But I was kind of chanting to myself by the end: "please, please, *please* don't let this be the first (or floggers and crosses, please not the last) thing someone first trying to figure out their kinky tendencies reads." Because I really feel that the chances of coming away from reading this anthology with negative feelings and associations about kink is really high. One might argue (even *I* might argue), that it is neither the job nor the responsibility of a short story anthology to be a steward of its readers in that way. But the introduction seems to argue that it is? Or at least that it wants to give readers an image of kink that is broad and more positive and more nuanced than the popular perception. And I'm just not sure it succeeds.

Have I just made an argument that this anthology's biggest flaw is a shitty introduction? Maybe. If you love literary short stories, you will almost certainly enjoy Kink more than I did. And if you've never read fiction about kink, I encourage you to start elsewhere.

*This is where I point out that romance, as a genre, is the most popular of all popular books, right? This is where I point out that romance consistently makes up just shy of half of all popular paperbacks sold yearly? And over a third of *all* popular fiction?

The Stories in Kink I Would Recommend

"The Cure," Melissa Febos
"Oh, Youth," Brandon Taylor
"The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror," Carmen Maria Machado
"The Voyeurs," Zeyn Joukhadar show less

This is a novel about a gay English teacher teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. It's dangerous to be gay here, the small group who attempt to march together in a protest march are beaten. The unnamed narrator tries to support a gay student, even as he deals constantly with his own insecurities and desires, observes this gray eastern European city that he has come to love, and falls in love.

Garth Greenwell's writing is both brilliant and nakedly honest. Whether he's writing about sitting in a café show more on a windy day or the shame he knows will follow bad behavior on a drunken night out, the writing and the experiences are so true that they are sometimes hard to read, or they bring an experience so fully to life that I half feel like I might have once been to Sofia.

This novel follows the narrator from Greenwell's earlier novel, What Belongs to You, but as someone who has yet to read it, I can tell you that Cleanness stands easily on its own. I will be reading it soon, though. show less

The unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s remarkable first novel is an American living in Sofia, Bulgaria, who in the first section meets a street hustler named Mitko in the public washroom of the National Palace of Culture. The narrator—still relatively young—is gay and makes no secret of it. In fact, full disclosure is his credo, and we later learn that people at the university where he teaches are aware of his orientation and not concerned. The encounter in the washroom marks the show more beginning of a relationship that, in brief sporadic bursts, extends over several years. At first, the narrator is obsessed with Mitko, charmed as much by his youthful vigor and risky lifestyle as by his supple body and sexual proficiency. The narrator is also someone who learned who he was early in life, learned to accept his identity and all of its implications even if his family did not. Much of the novel is given over to flashbacks or recollections, triggered when the narrator learns that back home in America his father is dying and wants to see him. The wound that this event opens is deep and, as we see, only in the early stages of healing. The narrator’s fascination with Mitko persists even after he learns that he’s been infected with syphilis, persists even after he consciously rejects the clichéd promiscuity that Mitko represents and settles into a monogamous relationship. He knows he has to cut him off, but what he cannot bear is Mitko’s loneliness, which is manifest in their every encounter and which again and again he takes it upon himself to assuage, even with Mitko treating his wallet like a personal bank account and occasionally even threatening physical harm. These aspects of Mitko simply feed the fascination. Greenwell’s novel is psychologically penetrating, uninhibited and dramatically intense. Densely written, every page crammed with evocative detail, the reflections on modern life offered up by its observant and acutely self-aware narrator are affecting, disturbing and thought-provoking. A supremely intelligent and lucid work of fiction that is also emotionally truthful, What Belongs to You will reward the adventurous reader looking for a new and genuinely original voice. show less

This book transcends a rather tired premise and a shaky beginning to become a very rewarding read. At the beginning I had a very definite sense that while the setting and the desire were very real, the business of paying for sex in a public toilet and the resulting emotional complications were somewhat confected. As a gay man I have certainly imagined what it would be like to pay for sex with a breathtakingly sexy hustler, but I have also imagined what it would be like to have a sublime show more singing voice or to buy an aircraft carrier and sail it around the world - that doesn't mean I should write a book about it.

However, as this initiating event fell further into the past, the book felt more real to me. There is plenty of emotional truth to be had in the narrator's reflections on his earlier life, and particularly in his struggles to find meaning in his adult life and his guilty suspicion that by living in Europe he might be running away from something. The theme of desire, which runs throughout the novel, is developed very well.

The writing is somewhat patchy, with mostly very evocative, powerful writing interspersed with rather clunky lines and a self-consciously literary style which I found distracting. The very long paragraph I found particularly distracting, because it wasn't actually one paragraph but just a bunch of consecutive paragraphs with the line breaks and indentation removed, so I didn't read it all in one sitting, but actually stopped at an obvious paragraph end (when he came back to the present momentarily from his reminiscence) and did something else before coming back to it.

Nevertheless, I found this a very enjoyable read and although it is less than 200 pages, it can be read quite slowly and really savoured. show less