Under the Trump regime, outrages fly so fast that time has been rearranged, made strange. The pandemic and the shuttering of the world adds another twist to time, making the days feel the same. Yesterday someone gave me a check and dated it October 25, 2020. I have to glance at my watch to see what day of the week it is. A student didn’t attend orientation because he forgot the time it started.

Unhinged from time, from normality, nothing feels certain anymore, and with that, I’ve lost the ability to concentrate. But there are antidotes. Long walks, long conversations, and luxuriously long sentences. It seems counterintuitive, but the long sentences in Garth Greenwell’s novel What Belongs to You require an attention that focuses my mind.

The novel is about an American teacher living in Bulgaria who becomes obsessed with a male hustler. Though the story is familiar, the sentences are not. They refuse Hemingway’s terse, declarative style in all its masculine hardness; they reject today’s frenetic brevity—short sentences have an inherent anxious energy, and Greenwell wants none of it. Told in retrospect, the dramatic engine in the story is the narrator’s interior, and the sentences capture his thoughtful, reflective, tormented, emotion-laden inner landscape.

Here is the novel’s opening sentence:

That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely.

When I’m too anxious, I can’t read this sentence. I skim, miss the meaning. This is, I remind myself, not a one-breath sentence. A simple sentence has one idea; this complex sentence has many. It’s 41 words long, in part, because of its elongated subject, which delays the verb, “should have given.” I wait even longer because of the qualifier, “even a minor one.” Greenwell sneaks in the word “time,” perhaps as a gentle reminder he is about to alter your sensation of time. He makes the sentence longer with the relative clause, “which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely.”

This sentence, like the narrator’s obsession with Mitko, refuses to give us an easy escape. Greenwell defies the common advice to use a short sentence after a long one to create different rhythms and give the reader some room to breathe. After his opening sentence, he writes a 49-word sentence:

But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there.

He grows this sentence by using a modifier to separate the subject “warning,” from the verb, “is” (a mid-branching sentence), then grows it more by way of simile, “like some element coterminous with the air,” pausing to modify the air, “ubiquitous and inescapable.” He ends, as he did with the previous sentence, with a clause.

The paragraphs are long, all-encompassing, which is mimetic, too, of the narrator’s obsession. For instance, one paragraph begins at the bottom of page 48, traverses page 49, and ends halfway down on page 50.

Here’s another sentence, which Greenwell lengthens using a different technique. In the story, the narrator’s father has discovered that the narrator is gay.

My father spoke in a different tone now, almost with a different voice, the voice of his own childhood, I thought, thick with the dirt he usually worked so hard to conceal.

This is a cumulative sentence. The base (or kernel) clause is “My father spoke in a different tone now.” Everything after this adds specificity to that tone. We linger here, letting that voice sink in and feel the way it is filled with contempt, as the narrator felt it as a boy.

And one more:

The air was cool as it flooded in but the foulness still remained, and though K. had always before filled me with joy he seemed part of my shame now and of the foulness in the air, not just a bodily foulness but something stranger and heavier.

The sentence grows first through a conjunction connecting the first independent clause, “The air was cool,” with the second, “the foulness still remained.” He continues to lengthen the sentence by using the conjunction “and” and adding a dependent clause, followed by another independent clause, “he seemed part of my shame now and of the foulness in the air.” Then modifies that foulness. A good sentence imposes a logic on the world. Greenwell’s sentences are a respite from these splintered, panicky times.