Perhaps emotion becomes most intense when it cannot be openly expressed, when it has to be inhibited or repressed. Non-normative feelings—same-sex desire, for example—are often cloaked in normative behavior, and this fear of judgment or disapproval breeds lies and deceit. Certainly the recent surge of support for same-sex marriage throughout the United States and the widespread celebrity support for the “It Gets Better” project have helped legitimize such feelings. But life outside conventional experience often remains enormously difficult to embrace in contrast to the acceptance that mainstream life offers.

Thomas Mann saw as much. In his Death in Venice, the aging protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach is summed up in two gestures by an observer: “‘You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this’—here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist—‘never like this’—and he let his open hand hang relaxed from the back of his chair.” He is introduced as an incredibly disciplined writer, almost to the point of self-abnegation, but over the course of Mann’s novella Aschenbach’s growing infatuation with the young boy he calls Tadzio brings about his own ruin. Struggling with this fascination, the old writer descends deeper and deeper into self-deceit and isolation as he attempts to justify and normalize his actions. While trimming his graying hair, a barber tells him: “You, for instance, signore, have a right to your natural color. Surely you will permit me to restore what belongs to you?” He proceeds to dye the man’s hair and apply makeup to feign youth and virility.

The barber’s canniness—his proposal both honest and deceptive, twinning faithfulness with betrayal—is implicit in the title of Garth Greenwell’s astonishing debut novel, What Belongs to You. Here, as in Mann’s novella, an older man falls for a younger one, and finds himself overwhelmed by that desire. However, the passion Mann condemned by equating it to the plague overrunning Venice and the war looming over Europe is thoroughly reframed by Greenwell’s acceptance. He exchanges the oppressive decadence of Venice for the poverty of modern-day Bulgaria and rural America, the two bleak landscapes providing a blank slate for this life carved by human need.

In the most acute moments of What Belongs to You, emotion transmutes from an aspect of the scene at hand to an observable object. This is most obviously seen in the exactitude with which Garth Greenwell’s narrator describes and measures and analyzes the body of Mitko, the Bulgarian prostitute he meets in an underground bathroom and falls in love with. This extraordinary focus transcends psychological realism and enters a realm of hyperrealism: “It had become difficult to imagine the desire I increasingly felt for him having any prospect of satisfaction.”

WHAT BELONGS TO YOU by Garth Greenwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pp., $23.00

Indeed, satisfaction proves nearly impossible to attain. What Belongs to You is, from its very first line, a story of unrequited love, and its narrator—whose name is never revealed—finds himself again and again struggling to turn his fantasy into a fully fleshed reality. Early on, we learn that he is an American expat teaching in Bulgaria, barely able to keep up a conversation in Bulgarian or ascribe concrete value to the leva and stotinki he keeps in his wallet. As he spends more time with the handsome Mitko, he comes to hear about Mitko’s priyateli, a title the younger man applies with equal ease to his friends and to the clients he sleeps with. The narrator may gradually shift from the latter category to the former, but if Mitko’s word for the narrator remains unchanged, the question remains of whether Mitko’s compassion undergoes any transformation into actual passion.