Garth Greenwell: ‘Cruising parks need to be written about with much more richness and nuance’

The debut author on meeting his hero Alan Hollinghurst and why he is happy to identify himself as a gay writer

In a crowded hotel coffee shop in Bloomsbury, Garth Greenwell is giggling guiltily as he recalls the moment he considered bunking off his publicity tour in favour of going to the theatre with the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, whom he had just met for the first time. A stern look from his publicist knocked that idea on the head, but you can understand why the otherwise dutiful Greenwell might have been tempted. He first read The Swimming-Pool Library as an undergraduate, “and it just knocked me flat”; Hollinghurst, he says, is “one of the essential writers for me”.

I had thought of Hollinghurst as I read What Belongs to You, Greenwell’s astonishingly assured debut novel, but questioned whether the parallel came to mind because both writers create vivid, enclosed worlds filled with ambiguous and shifting relationships between gay men. In fact, though, the greater similarity lies in their ability to blend a lyrical prose – the prose of longing, missed connections, grasped pleasures – with an almost uncanny depth of observation. “I knew he was performing a desire he didn’t feel,” writes the unnamed narrator in the novel’s opening pages, “and really I think he was drunk past the possibility of desire. But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.”

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