Forster and his young lover in Egypt, a tram ticket collector named Mohammed El Adl. Kip had wanted to write a novel about the great (and long-closeted) English novelist E.M. Besides, he adds, “I’m useless at anything but writing.” “All my life, through all the various ups and downs, I’ve only had one enduring dream: to be a published writer,” Kip tells us. As the story begins, Kip (short for Kipling) Starling has barricaded himself in his basement study with “five boxes of Premium Saltine Crackers, three tins of Café Bustelo, and twenty-one one-gallon jugs of Poland Spring water,” determined to write the novel an editor has told him she’d read if he could finish it in three weeks. Ostensibly about a young queer man in Manhattan, “Greenland” is also a novel of identity and place, but it is less about claiming one’s own territory than deciding who gets to come inside. But not since Iris Murdoch’s “The Philosopher’s Pupil” have I read a novel crammed full of so many ideas and tropes that they threaten to spill out of its margins. David Santos Donaldson’s debut, “ Greenland,” is certainly both.
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