CANR
WORK TITLE: Small Rain
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.garthgreenwell.com/
CITY: Iowa City
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 393
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 19, 1978, in Louisville, KY.
EDUCATION:Interlochen Arts Academy, graduated, 1996; attended Eastman School of Music; State University of New York at Purchase, B.A., 2001; Washington University, M.F.A., 2003; Harvard University, M.A., 2004; Iowa University, M.F.A., 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and activist. Arts Fellow, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; formerly taught English at the Greenhills School, Ann Arbor, MI, and at American College of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria.
AWARDS:Grolier Poetry Prize, 2000; John Atherton Scholar for Poetry, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 2008; Miami University Press Novella Prize, 2010, Edmund White Debut Fiction Award finalist, and Lambda Award finalist, all for Mitko; also received Rella Lossy Award, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation award, and Bechtel Prize, Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie fellowship, University of Iowa; Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Fiction, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 2016; Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Awards, 2021.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, Public Space, StoryQuarterly, and Vice.
What Belongs to You was adapted as an opera by David T. Little, 2021.
SIDELIGHTS
Garth Greenwell’s work includes the prize-winning novella Mitko and the novel that emerged from it, What Belongs to You. The latter “has already been described as ‘the great gay novel of our times,’” reported Steven W. Thrasher in an introduction to an interview with Greenwell for the Guardian. The novel, explained Thrasher, “follows a young, unnamed American narrator teaching in an American high school in Bulgaria, who is estranged from his father and who longs for a stable life with a steady boyfriend. Instead, he becomes obsessed with Mitko, a sex worker he meets cruising in a toilet. Greenwell wrote the novel while teaching in Bulgaria himself, though he says the book is fiction and ‘the narrator is not me.’” “The action, restrained as it is,” noted Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles, “takes place in modern- day Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, a city depicted as rotting in its own history. With few opportunities and a stagnant economy, those who can leave, do; everyone else wallows in hopelessness spiked with wry humor. Greenwell … borrows the broad outline of that experience as the basis for his unnamed protagonist, who has picked up a working fluency in Bulgarian, but few friends.”
In some ways, Greenwell’s novel is a story of gay liberation—still a vital topic in a post-marriage-equality world. The narrator of the novel has to come to terms with the variety of feelings, ranging from desire to shame, that make him who he is. “The book’s unnamed narrator plumbs the feelings of exploitation, loneliness, and overwhelming desire that are produced by his complicated, compulsive affair with a bewitching male prostitute named Mitko,” wrote Nicole Rudick in her introduction to an interview with Greenwell that appeared in the Paris Review. The narrator’s “experience of desire has always been an experience of exclusion, of seeing things he can’t have,” Greenwell told Rudick. “And so when he first meets Mitko and the young man makes clear to him that he’s available in a way, it’s an experience of wonder for the narrator. He thinks, I can’t believe I can just reach out and touch this thing. Part of what he finds exhilarating about Mitko is what seems like the promise of an exact alignment of desire and sex—that he can have this thing he overwhelmingly wants.”
“[The narrative] is fairly explicitly about shame, punishment, and disgust, among other things,” wrote James Wood in the New Yorker. “What is unusual is not the presence of these themes but the book’s complicated embrace of ‘foulness,’ and a barely suppressed longing for punishment, a longing embodied in the narrator’s relationship with Mitko. Greenwell’s novel impresses for many reasons, not least of which is how perfectly it fulfills its intentions. But it gains a different power from its uneasy atmosphere of psychic instability, of confession and penitence, of difficult forces acknowledged but barely mastered and beyond the conscious control of even this gifted novelist.” “This is a project of rare discernment and beauty, and it is not to be missed,” declared a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. “A luminous, searing exploration of desire, alienation, and the powerful tattoo of the past.”
Some reviewers have pointed out that although What Belongs to You is a novel of gay experience, it is also a story of privilege and of access to escape. Although the narrator is wounded by his homophobic father’s rejection, he nonetheless has access to opportunities that are denied to his boyfriend, Mitko, who is rooted in the post-Soviet economy and culture of Bulgaria. “Greenwell … reveal[s] Mitko only through the bleak, perhaps delusional, gaze of the White Man abroad,” asserted Arifa Akbar in the Independent. “It is, nevertheless, a feat that Greenwell makes the same old story new, and so devastating, in the final pages. The American is caught in his own nexus of desire and shame, as damaged and as lost as Mitko. That he is so aware of his limits, and the limits of his love, make this all the more tragic.” “I happen to be a graduate of the American College of Sofia where Greenwell taught,” remarked Maria Dimitrova in the New Statesman, “and I was impressed by his feel for the country and ear for its language. He captures a certain Balkan psychology and predicament, in which the possibility of moral action seems constrained, or even absent.” “The narrator’s idea of Bulgaria has fused with his idea of Mitko,” observed Christian Lorentzen in the Vulture. “Early on, we see Mitko in pictures from a dating site taken years before his hustler phase when he was an undamaged teenager. Before we get our last glimpse of him, drunk and all but wrecked, the narrator meets a restless young boy on a train in whom he can’t help but see Mitko. It’s hard to tell at times whether the narrator is the innocent abroad or an American abroad among innocents. Greenwell’s insight is that the destruction of innocence is a process that never halts.” “Ultimately, this is a story about chances and the unequal possibilities for escape for those emerging from different forms of wreckage,” concluded a reviewer for the Economist. “Greenwell offers a tender portrait of the longing for connection and acceptance that inhabits us all, gay or straight.”
Reviewers also celebrated Greenwell’s use of language. “Garth Greenwell’s writing is alive to the foreign and the unknown; he opens our eyes to worlds we had not realized existed alongside our own,” commented Jeffrey Zuckerman in the New Republic. “Even the landscape of Bulgaria, one of the poorest and least-known countries in Europe, is made vivid and vibrant.” “Just as a chance encounter beneath the National Palace of Culture enmeshes an American expatriate within a passionate relationship he had never considered possible, so does Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You make visible all the painful and beautiful facets of human life and human love,” added Zuckerman. “While other writers use the all-over style somewhat indiscriminately, lavishing the same degree of attention on descriptions of morning coffee or a joint as on Big Thoughts about art or mortality, Greenwell has an instinctual feel for sharpening his focus at key moments to create depth of feeling,” commented Aaron Hamburger in the New York Times Book Review. “Greenwell’s writing,” added Hamburger, “stands out from that of his ‘all over’ contemporaries, whose language sometimes slides into blandness or cliché. By contrast, Greenwell takes more consistent care with his finely wrought words and sentences. … And he is equally memorable on up- to-the-minute concerns like online communication.”
“We are given access to an interior radiance that’s blazing and singular, and has much to say about language, about class, about heritage, about desire, about deceit,” stated Christopher Frizzelle in a review in the Stranger. “The contradictions of feeling and lived experience run rampant through these pages, as the narrator variously succumbs to and resists the pressures of prurience and curiosity and doubt. And yet he never disappears up his own ass. The story is compelling in spite of its bareness, compelling enough that, toward the end, I started to resent anything in the outside world that prevented me from continuing to read.” Like Frizzelle, Telegraph reviewer Jonathan McAloon also found that he was “unable to stop reading” the novel. McAloon went on to note: “[Greenwell’s writing style] also demonstrates how our reading habits have shifted. Writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Hanya Yanagihara have shown a broad audience how compulsive, detailed recollection, rather than being a refined literary pleasure, can become a narrative thrust and keep us enthralled. On this strength, What Belongs to You is an essential work of our time.” “Greenwell, who started his writing life as a poet—getting up at 4.30 a.m. to work for two hours before his teaching day began—first wrote about Mitko in a prize-winning novella of the same name, which he recast to become What Belong to You ‘s opening section,” related Alex Clark in the conclusion to a Guardian interview with the author. “It is perhaps too soon to say precisely what Greenwell’s own fictional territory will look like—but even this early on, the landscape looks too riveting to miss.”
(0pen new)The narrator of What Belongs to You returns in Greenwell’s 2020 novel, Cleanness. In an interview with Ilya Kaminsky, contributor to the Paris Review website, Greenwell discussed the connection between the two works, stating: “I don’t think of Cleanness as a sequel to What Belongs to You. The books intermingle—their temporalities and characters overlap, but they also are autonomous, I hope. The first two or three pieces of what would become Cleanness were written while I was writing What Belongs to You, and I did have a sense of the projects as continuous. But they each had their own imperatives. It was clear that the first book would be very narrowly focused on the obsessive relationship at its heart. Cleanness is more ample.” In Cleanness, the narrator engages in risky sex and falls into a relationship with a Portuguese student of his, R., that could be damaging for his career and that does not makes sense in the long term.
In a lengthy and favorable assessment of Cleanness in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Court Stroud suggested: “Greenwell’s prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator’s first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions. None of the reporting may be as it seems, as it’s not clear whether the voice telling the tales is reliable or not. Yet through it all, the narrator reveals himself in flashes. It’s a bit like sitting next to a well-spoken, heartbroken (but pretending he’s not) passenger on an overnight bus who blathers on and on, but in the end, you find him fascinating.” “Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating. What distinguishes him is an ability to make sex on the page genuinely dramatic, by integrating its motions and sensations into the established stakes of the narrative,” remarked Michael LaPointe in TLS. A writer in Publishers Weekly commented: “This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative.” “The simple beauty of the writing is something to behold,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews critic. Writing in Commonweal, Frank B. Farrell suggested: “Greenwell performs a brave vivisection of the tangle of sexuality, violence, shame, and degradation within the self, rather than presenting queer life at its most appealing or reader-friendly.”
Greenwell is the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of Kink: Stories, a collection of works on certain aspects of the sexual experience. Contributors to the book include Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Peter Mountford, Brandon Taylor, Kwon, and Greenwell. “This visionary anthology successfully explores the range of sexual potency in the characters’ power plays,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Annie Bostrom, contributor to Booklist, praised “the script-flipping, heart-skipping stories,” calling them “intimate and wide ranging in every sense.”
Set in Iowa City, Small Rain follows an unnamed narrator, as he experiences a potentially fatal tear in his aorta and receives treatment for his condition. He interacts with the staff at the hospital, who inform him of the rarity and severity of his condition, and he reflects on his relationships and daily life while in his hospital bed. Greenwell discussed using his own experiences in his fiction in an interview with Adam Eli, writer on the Cultured website. Greenwell stated: “When I do use my lived experience, I do so because it seems aesthetically compelling—beautiful or dramatic in a way that’s appealing. With that said, it’s also true that I use art to think about things in my own experience that are really bewildering. When I am completely bewildered by something, that’s when I know I have to write about it.” He continued: “I’ve been open about having a medical crisis similar to the narrator’s, but our experiences in the hospital are totally different and the kinds of intimate relationships he forms with the people who take care of him are totally fictional.” In an interview with Meghan O’Rourke, contributor to the Yale Review, Greenwell noted: “The ambition of this book—to embody, as deeply and vividly and complexly as possible, the experience of being a particular embodied being in time—is a formal project. I never write with any utility, any lesson, in mind. Existence doesn’t offer lessons—though my narrator might be seeking them. But the experience of stepping into the light of another person’s existence—the experience art offers with a vividness and profundity unavailable elsewhere—can have profound effects.” He added: “I do hope doctors and other care providers read this book. Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care.”
A reviewer in the Guardian asserted: “The body is the medium of Greenwell’s humanism. Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, he explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain—not through ascribing morality to sickness, but through our response to it.” A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested: “Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.” Michael Magras, contributor to BookPage, remarked: “At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.” “This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details,” wrote Francesca Peacock in Spectator. Charles Arrowsmith, contributor to the Washington Post, commented: “Small Rain is a pacey read, with Greenwell’s style fluently reflecting the narrator’s restless, lively thinking. Where one might expect a period one finds a comma or semicolon; where commas aren’t strictly required, there are none. Long paragraphs and no quotation marks make the prose almost frictionless. It’s a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical.” “To the degree that Small Rain is another instalment in an unmaking and remaking of Garth Greenwell’s writerly self, it offers a welcome call to action—to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew,” stated Andrew Van Der Vlies in TLS.(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2015, Brad Hooper, review of What Belongs to You, p. 25; January 1, 2021, Annie Bostrom, review of Kink: Stories, p. 34.
BookPage, September, 2024, Michael Magras, review of Small Rain, p. 18.
Bookseller, February 12, 2016, Steven Cooper, “5 Bookseller Choices: April,” p. 20.
Commonweal, May, 2020, Frank B. Farrell, “Apollo’s Not Enough,” review of Cleanness, p. 57.
Economist, January 23, 2016, “Come as You Are; American Fiction,” p. 76.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, March-April, 2020, Court Stroud, “Dark Nights of Sofia,” review of Cleanness, p. 33.
Guardian (London, England), January 25, 2016, Steven W. Thrasher, author interview; March 26, 2016, Alex Clark, author interview; October 4, 2024, review of Small Rain.
Independent (London, England), March 24, 2016, Arifa Akbar, review of What Belongs to You.
International New York Times, September 16, 2024, Dwight Garner, “The Endless Drama, and Tedium, of a Medical Mystery,” review of Small Rain.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2015, review of What Belongs to You; October 15, 2019, review of Cleanness;August 1, 2024, review of Small Rain.
New Republic, January 19, 2016, Jeffrey Zuckerman, “Beneath the Pain of Exclusion,” review of What Belongs to You.
New Statesman, May 13, 2016, Maria Dimitrova, “Transaction Denied,” review of What Belongs to You, p. 51.
New Yorker, February 8, 2016, James Wood, “Unsuitable Boys,” includes review of What Belongs to You.
New York Times Book Review, January 31, 2016, Aaron Hamburger, review of What Belongs to You; February 14, 2021, Jazmine Hughes, “Safe Words,” review of Kink, p. 17; September 29, 2024, Dwight Garner, “Alive and Unwell,” review of Small Rain, p. 14.
Paris Review, January 19, 2016, Nicole Rudick, “Bodies in Space: An Interview with Garth Greenwell.”
Publishers Weekly, October 5, 2015, review of What Belongs to You, p. 33; October 21, 2019, review of Cleanness, p. 48; October 26, 2020, review of Kink, p. 55.
Spectator, April 9, 2016, Philip James Maughan, “Obscure Object of Desire,” review of What Belongs to You, p. 35; October 5, 2024, Francesca Peacock, “The Consolidation of Poetry,” review of Small Rain, p. 33.
Telegraph (London, England), April 7, 2016, Jonathan McAloon, review of What Belongs to You.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 2020, Michael LaPointe, “Ridiculous, Unless Lit Up: Garth Greenwell’s Flights of Freedom,” review of Cleanness, p. 21; September 13, 2024, Andrew Van Der Vlies, “Blow, Wind, Blow! Garth Greenwell’s Antidote to Our Crisis of Attention,” review of Small Rain, p. 17.
Washington Post, January 19, 2016, Ron Charles, review of What Belongs to You; September 2, 2024, Charles Arrowsmith, “Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain Is a Timeless Work,” review of Small Rain.
ONLINE
Cultured, https://www.culturedmag.com/ (September 3, 2024), Adam Eli, author interview.
Garth Greenwell website, http://www.garthgreenwell.com (June 29, 2016).
Paris Review Online, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (January 14, 2020), Ilya Kaminsky, author interview.
Stranger, http://www.thestranger.com/ (February 10, 2016), Christopher Frizzelle, “Garth Greenwell’s Brilliant Debut Novel, What Belongs to You, Is All about Gay Sex and the Desire for Intensity.”
Vulture, http:// www.vulture.com/ (January 1, 2016), Christian Lorentzen, “Garth Greenwell’s Exquisite, Humorless New Novel.”
Yale Review Online, https://yalereview.org/ (November 11, 2024), Meghan O’Rourke, author interview.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Garth Greenwell
Born March 19, 1978 (age 46)
Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
Education Interlochen Arts Academy
Alma mater State University of New York at Purchase (BA)
Washington University in St. Louis (MFA)
Harvard University (MA)
Occupation Novelist
Known for What Belongs to You
Cleanness
Small Rain
Garth Greenwell (born March 19, 1978) is an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and educator. He has published the novella Mitko (2011) and the novels What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020). He has also published stories in The Paris Review[1] and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker[2] and The Atlantic.[3]
In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow.[4][5]
Early life
Garth Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 19, 1978, in a family of tobacco farmers. When he was 14, his father discovered he was gay and kicked him out of the house.[6] He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, in 1996. He studied voice at the Eastman School of Music, then transferred to earn a BA degree in Literature with a minor in Lesbian and Gay Studies from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2001, where he served as a contributing editor for In Posse Review and received the 2000 Grolier Poetry Prize.[7][8] He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, an MA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and also spent three years on Ph.D. coursework there.[9]
Career
Greenwell taught English at Greenhills, a private high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria; the school is famous for being the oldest American educational institution outside the US.[10] His frequent book reviews in the literary journal West Branch transitioned into a yearly column called "To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry."[11][12][13]
Greenwell's first novella, Mitko, won the Miami University Press Novella Prize[14] and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award as well as the Lambda Award.[14] His work has appeared in Yale Review,[15] Boston Review,[16] Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review,[17] and Poetry International, among others.
His debut novel, What Belongs to You, was called the "first great novel of 2016" by Publishers Weekly.[18] His second novel, Cleanness, was published in January 2020 and well received by critics.[19][20][21]
Greenwell has received the Grolier Prize, the Rella Lossy Award, an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and the Bechtel Prize from the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.[22] He was the 2008 John Atherton Scholar for Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.[22]
LGBT rights advocacy in Bulgaria
In its article "Of LGBT, Life and Literature," the English-language weekly newspaper Sofia Echo credits Greenwell's publications with bringing much needed attention to the LGBT experience in Bulgaria and to other English-speaking audiences through various broadcasts, interviews, blog posts, and reviews.[23]
In an interview with Literary Hub about the release of Kinks, he said about Grindr: "I want to argue for the value of those spaces existing as well. I would want to argue—again, with the understanding that there are lots of places for gay men to meet gay men, where nobody’s going to grab anyone’s crotch—that the kind of sociality that is possible in that atmosphere of permissiveness is really valuable. I would want to argue for places like that being able to exist."[24]
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2017)
Novels
What Belongs to You. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016.
What Belongs to You (U.K. ed.). Picador. 2016.
Cleanness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020.
Small Rain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024.
Anthologies (edited)
Kink, co-edited with R.O. Kwon. Simon & Schuster. 2021.
Short fiction
Year Title[a] First published Reprinted/collected Notes
2011 Mitko Mitko. Miami University Press. 2011. Novella
2017 An Evening Out Greenwell, Garth (August 21, 2017). "An Evening Out". The New Yorker. Vol. 93, no. 24. pp. 62–69.
2018 The Frog King "The Frog King". The New Yorker. Vol. 94, no. 42. November 26, 2018. pp. 74–81.
2019 Harbor "Harbor". The New Yorker. September 16, 2019.
Essays and reporting
"Get out of town : 'The end of Eddy', a novel of class and violence in the provinces". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 93 (12): 62–65. May 8, 2017.[b]
Adaptations
What Belongs to You was adapted as a 2021 opera by composer/librettist David T. Little. The premiere production was by Mark Morris, starring Karim Sulayman as the narrator, and conducted by Alan Pierson.[25]
QUOTED: "I don’t think of Cleanness as a sequel to What Belongs to You. The books intermingle—their temporalities and characters overlap, but they also are autonomous, I hope. The first two or three pieces of what would become Cleanness were written while I was writing What Belongs to You, and I did have a sense of the projects as continuous. But they each had their own imperatives. It was clear that the first book would be very narrowly focused on the obsessive relationship at its heart. Cleanness is more ample."
Promiscuity Is a Virtue: An Interview with Garth Greenwell
By Ilya Kaminsky January 14, 2020At Work
I first met Garth Greenwell when we were both undergraduates. At that time, Garth had studied music and wrote very beautiful poetry. His native talent with the English language was evident to anyone who met him or saw him speak. His commitment to writing was inspirational; even as a young student, he lived in a room with two cats and many, many hundreds of books. He could talk about poetry for hours, and everything he said was formulated in eloquent, unpredictable sentences. Twenty years have passed since then, as have many poems, three books of prose, and thousands of miles between us. Garth and I have since crossed paths in Michigan, Washington, DC, New York City, Iowa, Texas, and several times in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he lived for a number of years and where all of his books are set. He still speaks in more beautiful sentences than anyone else I know. There is simply no one like him, no one so able to give musical shape to ideas both on a page and in person. His books, the prize-winning novella Mitko, the much-acclaimed novel What Belongs To You, and now the new work, Cleanness, all vibrate with intelligence and passion, and with exquisite control of language.
Garth Greenwell has received the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, What Belongs To You was selected as a best book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City. When we conducted this conversation, Garth was in Iowa and I was in Atlanta, so the following took place over email.
INTERVIEWER
As I was reading Cleanness, I couldn’t help but think of lines from Louise Gluck. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved.” I thought also of Catullus’s famous line: “I hate and love.” Your work captures this tension with enviable clarity and precision. Can you speak a little bit about this?
GREENWELL
The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality.
INTERVIEWER
Between is the word reviewers of your work mention most often. Your work is described as mapping the territory between vulnerability and sustainability, between love and alienation, between desire and shame, between passion and confusion. Where do you locate this “between”?
GREENWELL
The “Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds,” Stevens calls for at the end of “Idea of Order at Key West” have always seemed to me like a goal of art. I’m drawn to art that expands and multiplies complexity, art that seeks ever finer gradations of feeling and thought. When do we ever feel a single feeling, or for long? When are we ever wholehearted? How long can we stay in a single place, or stay there happily? Between-ness is the human condition, it seems to me. Certainly itinerancy has characterized my life. Between-ness is also the condition of art. We love to draw lines and borders. Desire and art-making are border-crossing impulses. Promiscuity—an eagerness for mixture, excitement at the new things arrived at through unexpected encounters—is one of the virtues I most admire in thinking, in art-making, in life.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if you could also speak about the book’s existence between Europe and the U.S.? I mean this about both the physical location—you have spent many years in Bulgaria—and also in terms of literary influences—James, Mann, Sebald, among others, are an influence on your work, and yet your writing is unmistakably American. Do you see Cleanness as a European book or an American one? Do these distinctions even exist for you?
GREENWELL
I don’t know how much these distinctions exist for me. Certainly I think the conversation of art doesn’t care about them very much. I’ve always been turned off by a kind of assertive Americanism, and the American writers I love best, from Hawthorne and James and Baldwin to Alexander Chee and Yiyun Li, have all been cosmopolitan in their tastes and views. Of course, America is important to my writing—the landscape of the American South, the rhythms of American speech, the expansive, sometimes-redemptive, sometimes-toxic sense of American selfhood. What it means to be American is one of the subjects of my books, as it is of any book about Americans abroad. Bulgaria is important to the books, too. I was speaking Bulgarian every day as I wrote What Belongs to You. Often enough, I spoke only Bulgarian. The rhythms of Bulgarian—the most beautiful, the most musical language in the world, so far as I’m concerned—are part of those sentences, as is the cityscape of Mladost, the quarter of Sofia where I lived, which I also think is very beautiful, though maybe with a difficult kind of beauty.
Again, for me the great human virtue is promiscuity, the fact that we love mixture, that we are excited by collisions between cultures, languages, traditions. This is why I’m so disgusted by the rejection of this virtue by nationalists of various stripes—and also why I’m resistant to “stay in your lane” condemnations of “cultural appropriation.” Of course, encounters with the other are fraught with peril and—like any ethically meaningful human endeavor—inherently “problematic.” Of course, we need to be mindful and reverent as we attempt to reach across borders of various kinds. But any attempt to build walls—between bodies, between cultural traditions, between languages and aesthetics—is abhorrent to me.
INTERVIEWER
The characters in Cleanness experience suffering. And yet, “Frog King,” at the very center of the book, is a story that opens up the possibility of profound happiness. When asked about that elsewhere, you responded, “To a certain kind of temperament—my temperament, I guess—the assumption that happiness is less interesting than suffering (“happy families are all alike,” etc.) and therefore a less worthy subject for art, seems natural, self-evident. But I think that assumption is wrong. It’s an aesthetic failing but also a moral one, it seems to me now, to see happiness, even very ordinary happiness, as somehow less profound, variegated, interesting, less accommodating of insight, than other kinds of experience. I worry sometimes, in contemporary fiction, that we assume trauma is the most interesting story we have to tell.” I love that answer, and wonder if you could expand a bit?
GREEENWELL
Well, one of the differences between the books is that I hope Cleanness is better. What Belongs to You was my first attempt to write fiction, and I do think Cleanness does things I couldn’t have managed in the first book. Its canvas is broader. There are many more characters, many more settings. And yes, I hope that there are many more emotional notes. We all have our particular temperaments—they aren’t things we can justify or defend—and mine tends to a tragic view of life. My tendency is to feel profundity and resonance most immediately in melancholy things. But I want the art I make to be bigger than my temperament, and it is among my central beliefs that any human experience, any human feeling, is profound when we explore it with the right tools.
When it comes to “The Frog King,” there was also a kind of existential imperative. I love the characters at the heart of the book, and the book is often quite hard on them, and I wanted to give them a kind of idyll. I wanted to allow them a less complicated happiness than they get in the rest of the book. I found that chapter incredibly hard to write, and weirdly devastating. It’s the lesson of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” I guess—if you want to be heartbroken, take happiness as your theme.
INTERVIEWER
One way in which Cleanness is a departure from your previous work is its frank and candid depiction of sexual intimacy. You said, in another interview, that “sex is one of our most charged forms of communication, and that makes it a unique opportunity for a writer. One thing that interests me is expanding charged moments and dissecting their emotional intricacies; in that way, sex is a kind of provocation, a challenge.” You also said, “Sex is inextricable from philosophy. It is a source of all of our metaphysics. It’s the experience that puts us most in our animal bodies, and yet also gives us our most intense intimations of something beyond those bodies.” Might you speak a bit more on this, specifically as it applies to Cleanness?
GREENWELL
The prejudice against writing sex in Anglo-American literature is something that utterly baffles me. What a bizarre thing it is to claim that this central, profound territory of human life is off-limits to literary or artistic representation. Sex seems to me one of the densest and most intense human phenomena, one of the things I find it hardest to think about—and so something I want to think about in art. The biggest surprise to me about the reception of my first book—other than the fact of there being any reception at all—was how much discussion there was about the sex in it. There isn’t very much sex in it! It said something about the culture of mainstream publishing in America in 2016 that a novel with maybe three or four pages of explicit sex between men could seem surprising.
In Cleanness, I wanted to think about sex much more deeply—as a form of sociality, as an excavation of the self, as an attempt to engage ethically with the other, an attempt that often fails. I wanted to try to get to the bottom of the abyss desire is for me. Of course, one never gets to the bottom of an abyss, an abyss has no bottom—but I had the experience, especially writing “Gospodar” and its companion chapter, “The Little Saint,” of going far enough I was afraid I wouldn’t find my way back. I think sex and desire are great revelations, often but not always comfortless revelations, of our ethical capacities and limitations, of our porousness to elements of culture we might want to inoculate ourselves against. I wanted to write them in all their changes, as modes of sustained intimacy, as modes of encountering strangers, as modes of power and submission. I wanted to think about the way that sex and desire lead us to precipices of various kinds. Sex can go terribly wrong, and the book does explore sex as trauma. But it can also go surprisingly, even miraculously right, and I hope the book also explores how sex can be reparative, maybe even redemptive. How it can expose us to experiences of overwhelming joy.
INTERVIEWER
“Cleanness” is the title of a fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative poem by an unknown author. In that text, “cleanness” has a religious or metaphysical quality. Your Cleanness mentions the word itself only once. Your narrator says, “Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.” Can you say more on what this word means for you?
GREENWELL
No concept is more alluring, more potentially inspiring, or more dangerous than cleanness. I wanted to think about the different ways we use ideas of cleanness and filth, how we apply them to geographies, to desires, to bodies, in ways that confuse the physical and the metaphysical. “Are you clean?” on gay cruising apps, is a question about HIV status. The poem you reference is a retelling of several Bible stories, including the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is the nightmare version of the cleanness that rage for purity leads us to. That rage is always a response, I think, to the fear many people feel in the face of the desire we feel for filth. One of the journeys my narrator is on is an attempt to shape a life that accommodates both urges, that acknowledges and makes room for his competing desires for purity and for filth.
INTERVIEWER
I hope we can speak a bit more about content and form. Speaking elsewhere about the new book, you say, “Desire is the great inciting incident of plot, because it’s an impulse that engages our wills … Desire is something that happens to us, something before which we’re prone; it defeats our will and disrupts all our intentions.” Can you expand?
GREENWELL
I think that’s true about desire as a narrative device, that it’s almost uniquely interesting in the way that it at once takes our will from us—we don’t get to choose what turns us on—and itself becomes our will—we’ll go to great lengths to satisfy our desire. That’s true of the desire that motivates art as well. We make many choices as we make art, some of them agonizing, but we don’t get to choose what moves us, what we feel compelled to make.
I hope that both of my books explore desire not just in their content but in their construction and their style. I think this is true at the level of how the books are put together, the way their form pushes against linear plot, striving to inhabit a kind of lyric or queer time. But I feel it most intensely at the level of the sentence. The kind of sentence I’m drawn to, which constantly falls back on itself in correction or hesitation or defeat but is also drawn forward by the demands of rhythm and cadence, feels mimetic of desire to me, even of sex. It also feels mimetic of thinking, or of the kind of libidinal thinking that happens in my writing. I don’t feel that sentences are containers for thoughts that precede them. The sentences, the pressure of syntax, the pleasures and possibilities of rhythm and cadence, produce the thought. In that way, form and content are inextricable.
INTERVIEWER
Your work has always been innovative in scope. You have published in various different genres, from poetry to literary criticism to short stories, a novella, novels. Your work has also been shape-shifting—what one might think of as a novella, Mitko, becomes a novel right in front of our eyes in What Belongs to You. What one might first assume is a collection of short stories—Cleanness— morphs into something else entirely. How did that happen?
GREENWELL
None of this—the shifts from poetry to prose, the fact that the novella grew into something larger—was planned. I wish I were disciplined and confident enough to plan out a career and then embody my plan, like Zola did—or, well, maybe I don’t wish that at all. I like artists whose works feel at once monumental and contingent, hesitating, accommodating of error and accident. The various versions of Leaves of Grass, James’s revisions, Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Not a thought, but a mind thinking. Art as object, but also art as action. The ideal is an object that still has the vibrancy, the dynamism, of the action.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see Cleanness as a sequel to What Belongs to You, as a story told by the same narrator, in the same location? And, if so, will there be a trilogy?
GREENWELL
I don’t think of Cleanness as a sequel to What Belongs to You. The books intermingle—their temporalities and characters overlap, but they also are autonomous, I hope. The first two or three pieces of what would become Cleanness were written while I was writing What Belongs to You, and I did have a sense of the projects as continuous. But they each had their own imperatives. It was clear that the first book would be very narrowly focused on the obsessive relationship at its heart. Cleanness is more ample. It lets in more of the world. My next book will be set in America, not Bulgaria, but it will intermingle with the first two in a similar way. I’m drawn to writers whose books feel at once like well-wrought, autonomous objects, and like a single, unfolding project. I don’t know what I will want to write in ten years, but right now, the idea of books that are both individual and porous is something that excites me.
INTERVIEWER
I began this conversation with a few lines of poetry, so I would like to end it on poetry. When I first met you, you wrote and spoke only about poetry. I was worried you might abandon this engagement, but you have clearly continued the conversation. You recently published a beautiful interview with Frank Bidart in The Paris Review. What do you continue to get from poetry that you might or might not get from literary fiction?
GREENWELL
For better and for worse, everything I do as a fiction writer is a result of having spent decades as a poet. Even though I haven’t written poetry in several years, poetry is still central to my life, and I still think of myself more naturally as a poet than as a novelist. I read poems every day. I still write a great deal about poetry. I teach poetry whenever I teach a fiction workshop. When I wrote poetry, I often felt as though I were sculpting language out of silence, trying to divorce words from their necessary relationship to time. Frank Bidart says this in one of his poems, that the goal is to nail something “outside time.” Writing prose, I feel language very much in time—the unit is the phrase or sentence, very seldom the individual word. The interrelation of syntax with time feels generative, a blessing. But I like feeling poetry ready to hand. I like feeling that it is possible to suspend the horizontal movement of prose and reach along the vertical axis of the lyric. Maybe that movement, from horizontal to vertical, from narrative to lyric, is one of the characteristic movements of my fiction, or maybe—I guess this feels more true to me—I’m trying to strike some quixotic, impossible middle ground between them.
I worry about the way that, for American writers, our reading and our identifications seem to be becoming more insular. Many of the fiction writers I know don’t read poetry. Almost none of the American writers I know read in other languages—few of them read widely even in translation. That seems a little tragic to me, and doesn’t bode well for the health of American literature. As an artist, I want to be curious, voracious, promiscuous—to use that word again. I want my sense of what art can do to be enlarged. To do that means turning away from the familiar—our familiar genres, our familiar languages, our familiar locales—toward experiences that challenge us and, especially, that make us question the orientation we’ve adopted toward the world. That turning toward the unfamiliar is something that desire encourages us to dare to do, I think. The writer in America has been professionalized to a perilous extent. I don’t think great art is likely to be made by professionals. I think it’s more likely to be impeded by the demands and values of professionalization. The ideal development of the artist is libidinal, I think, spurred not by the demands of the academy or the world of professional publishing, but by the imperatives of desire, by seeking out complicated pleasures.
Read Garth Greenwell’s “Godospar,” which appears as a chapter in Cleanness, in our Summer 2014 issue, and his Art of Fiction interview with Frank Bidart in our Summer 2019 issue.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press). His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Foundation’s Fellowship and the NEA Fellowship. His poems regularly appear in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Read his poem “From ‘Last Will and Testament’” in our Winter 2018 issue.
QUOTED: "The ambition of this book—to embody, as deeply and vividly and complexly as possible, the experience of being a particular embodied being in time—is a formal project. I never write with any utility, any lesson, in mind. Existence doesn’t offer lessons—though my narrator might be seeking them. But the experience of stepping into the light of another person’s existence—the experience art offers with a vividness and profundity unavailable elsewhere—can have profound effects."
"I do hope doctors and other care providers read this book. Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care."
The novelist on writing about the body in crisis
Meghan O’Rourke
Arisk of all writing about embodiment is that the writer’s thinking overtakes the messy material itself, leading to banality or sentimentality or false tidiness. Everyone knows that writing about sex is hard; what fewer people are aware of is that it is just as hard, or even harder, to write about illness. (Working on my last book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, I found myself lamenting the fact that literature has so little to say about illness. In particular, we still have too few novels or poems that forcefully capture the bewildering experience of entering the bureaucracies of the modern Western healthcare system at our most mortally vulnerable moments.) The novelist Garth Greenwell has produced some of the best writing about sex in our time; perhaps it is not a surprise, then, that in his new novel, Small Rain, he offers an exquisite addition to the literature of illness.
I have been excited for Small Rain ever since I heard Greenwell read a virtuosic passage from it at The Yale Review Festival in 2023. The novel is narrated by a mid-career poet who undergoes a serious medical crisis and ends up in the hospital for around two weeks. The novel’s story is largely contained to that period of time, and within the slurry of hours it portrays, Small Rain meditates on mortality and the politics of COVID; the recompense of art, especially poetry; and the ultimate redemption that domesticity, despite its dailiness, brings. Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.
We corresponded by Google doc this August; the result has been lightly edited.
—Meghan O’Rourke, Editor
Meghan O’Rourke Small Rain stages a writer’s confrontation with mortality and unimaginable pain—a medical crisis which brings him into the grips of a bureaucratic medical system. Why did you think this was the material for a novel?
Garth Greenwell The book is not autobiography, but I underwent a medical crisis in 2020 similar to the narrator’s and emerged from it utterly bewildered—about what my body had undergone, about what the experience meant for my understanding of my life. That state of bewilderment is what compels writing for me, or at least novel writing. I think we need art because there are situations we can’t think about with our other tools for thinking. I couldn’t reason my way to an understanding of what had happened to me; I needed to dwell in it. And to do that I needed the tools of fiction: character and scene, and also the peculiar pressure of the aesthetic.
By “aesthetic,” I just mean work whose meaning resides not just in its content, in what it says, but in its medium. In aesthetic writing, the nondenotative aspects of language—syntax, image, repetition, rhythm, the deep histories of words—become dense with meaning and emotion; they exert a pressure on connotative meaning; they allow language to mean more. Aesthetic writing isn’t particular to fiction, of course, but the aesthetic is more available to me, just because of my sensibility, the tools I have at my disposal, in fiction.
I also needed invention, I needed to make things up. People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is “true,” it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed. It’s like looking at someone’s oil painting and asking, “How much of that is flax?”
MO’R Ha! As a poet who draws on lived experience, I think of the poems as aesthetic objects that have little to do with autobiography—so this is a satisfying analogy.
At one point in Small Rain, the narrator says, “The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” In her own writing about illness, Virginia Woolf lamented what she called “the poverty of the language” we have for illness and pain. As she put it, “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself.” Do you agree? Was overcoming this poverty of the language part of the aesthetic challenge of writing this book?
GG I think that’s just baked into art as one of the challenges; we always feel the poverty of our medium. (We also often feel its richness.) Art tries to make incommensurate things commensurate. Trying to put the world on the page is a wildly quixotic endeavor: How does one translate sight or taste into language, much less feeling? I’ve often said that writing sex (which I’m often asked about) and writing the experience of eating a muffin are equally difficult to do well, by which I mean absolutely impossible. All writing strives to cross that gap between experience and the medium we have to express experience.
That said, I do think extreme pain doesn’t just resist but destroys language; it places our medium beyond our grasp.
MO’R Precisely. In her seminal text, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry famously wrote, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language.” As someone who has experienced many kinds of pain—some obliterating, some chronic—I felt you fully captured the strangeness of acute pain. (For another conversation: There is, too, the way both sex and pain can produce a kind of shame that is almost hard to recognize one feels.)
GG I think that’s true. I think I’ve always been interested in the body in crisis—and sex and pain are both kinds of crisis. In Small Rain, the narrator says he feels annihilated by the pain, “a creature evacuated of soul.” It’s important that in that first line of the novel he’s reporting his experience of that first crushing pain, not in the grip of it. In the grip of it, he’s not capable of speech. Woolf has that beautiful image in her essay on sickness of the utterly inviolable privacy of some secret chamber of the self: she says it’s like a patch of ground where not even the prints of bird feet disturb the snow. That’s where overwhelming, crushing pain resides. I don’t want to say it places us beyond humanness; clearly, it’s part of humanness, something that we undergo. But it displaces many of the recognizable signposts of human experience.
MO’R The writing about your narrator’s hospital stay is granular and detailed. You make the reader feel the almost second-by-second ordeal of being in a hospital—the many needles, the noises, the lights, the grim ceiling tiles one stares at during even grimmer procedures. (This all rang true to me as someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals.) Why did you decide to enact the reality of the medical system in such detail?
GG Mostly because I just thought it was interesting. Woolf also notes in her essay that the experience of being gravely ill—or even of being moderately ill, of being indisposed—is weirdly underreported in literature. (I’ve started keeping a list of great hospital sequences in literature; it’s a surprise to me how few they are.) The texture of life in the hospital, which is at once utterly regimented and also weirdly unmoored, rigidly timed and timeless—capturing that texture is one of the projects of the book.
MO’R “Rigidly timed and timeless” is a fantastic description of hospital chronology.
I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time.
GG I do think that’s how it feels. And capturing the texture of existence is at the heart of artmaking for me. If there is a hope of uncovering the revelatory, of arriving at something “universal” to human experience, it lies in the devotion to the particular, in examining the moment-by-moment experience of an embodied being. Certainly that’s true of the tradition I feel like I’m working in, which I guess I would call the novel of consciousness.
MO’R Narrative time in Small Rain moves slowly and blurrily, much the way it does in hospitals. Tell us more about the formal choices that you made here—why and how did you slow time down so much?
GG This ties in with the idea of the novel of consciousness, which has a deep kinship with the lyric poem. It depends on a kind of sifting of experience. We are quicksilver beings; we can experience in a flash the whole gamut of emotion. Slowing down time offers a chance to unpack experience, to try to sift through the information that makes charged moments feel charged.
I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time. If something is keeping external clock time for you, you’re free to explore internal time, our experience of time (now fast, now slow) as wildly as you want. Virginia Woolf can fly off anywhere she wants in Mrs. Dalloway because the chimes of Big Ben will always anchor her again in clock time. The regimentation of the hospital is something like that. Every four hours, the narrator will get his pain medication; every eight hours, he’ll have a heparin shot. So the narrative can go where it wants: to his childhood; to his relationship with his partner, L; to his thoughts on art and poetry.
The novel’s first sentence suggests how time will work in the novel. It places us in the ER, where the narrator is being asked about his experience; it also reaches back to the experience of the pain itself in that impossible attempt to recover and catch it. Time in the novel functions like a set of transparencies laid atop one another. Which is how memory works, I think, and especially how sensory experience interacts with memory: when we encounter a smell, for instance, or a taste, we also encounter all our memories of that smell or taste.
MO’R Researching The Invisible Kingdom I was struck by the fact that there are not as many English-language books about illness as I wished there were. I found myself clinging to the ones I liked—Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness; Emily Dickinson’s poems about pain and migraines. Do you see yourself as writing within a tradition of literature of illness? If so, how did that shape your sense of what you were doing?
GG I don’t think I was consciously working within that tradition, in part because, as you say, there are fewer of those texts than one would expect. Certainly I had read around in what we might think of as the literature of illness, especially in the literature of AIDS—and Hervé Guibert’s accounts of hospitals and clinics, just to name one example, surely influenced the way I imagined those environments in Small Rain. But that wasn’t conscious. My greater awareness of literature exploring the experience of being a hospital patient has come after writing Small Rain, and again, it’s a little hard to find passages that do the work I’m interested in. There’s the beginning of James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. There’s the (tremendously powerful) middle section of Miranda July’s The First Bad Man. There’s Pamela Erens’s Eleven Hours. I haven’t read the Broyard—I’ll seek it out.
MO’R I think it’s wonderful; it captures the disjunction between intimacy and bureaucracy that is key to our experience of health care. The other day, a newly minted medical doctor and I were talking about the challenges patients experience with our healthcare system, in particular in hospitals; a main problem, I suggested, is that we experience what for us are deeply intimate crises in the most bureaucratic and impersonal environments, amongst harried and busy strangers. I recall being struck that it was a doctor neither my mother nor I had ever met who, in the hospital, told us she was dying. Not her oncologist; not her primary care doctor; the random resident who was on call that day that she was admitted from the ER.
I am not sure what there is to be done about this fact, but naming that reality, as you do, feels very important to me. What felt most important here about the milieu of the hospital as a setting for your book?
GG This was one of the primary points of fascination for me. The narrator receives so much particularized attention, and his body is made to produce so much particularized information. But that particular attention strips him of his individuality, of what he feels as his personhood. It’s only in his moments with his partner, L, that he feels returned to himself, a person again, not just a patient. He longs to be seen by someone who knows him in the context of his life outside the hospital, because so much of who he is is that context.
MO’R That longing to be fully seen in your hospital bed is very powerful; I felt it too. We want to be visible as we face our mortality.
GG That’s right, I think. But there’s an asymmetry built into the patient-health practitioner relationship: the patient is undergoing something utterly unprecedented, life-changing, all-consuming. The health practitioner is doing her job—a job that is largely routinized. The narrator in Small Rain feels himself reduced to “an interesting case” for the people who are treating him—and reduced is the word; he feels this as a diminishment. He’s affronted (when he’s not charmed) by the fact that the ICU nurses chatter about their days outside his room while he (and everyone else in the ICU) is undergoing something so dire.
That asymmetry doesn’t shut down human interaction, though, or human recognition: acts of tenderness, intimacy, connection still occur. The narrator compares his relationship to his nurses to his experience of teaching. The teacher-student relationship is asymmetrical, too—routine on one side and singular, unprecedented on the other. (You’re only ever a tenth grader once.) At the end of the day, the teacher goes home; she sets aside (or tries to, anyway) the urgent worries of the day, the narratives of her students’ lives. Surviving as an educator means drawing a boundary around one’s care for one’s students, leaving it, as best one can, in the classroom. That doesn’t negate the care; it doesn’t make it unreal. And both of these are relationships that have an ending baked in: for both the health practitioner-patient and the teacher-student relationship, success means the relationship ends.
MO’R Even as hospitals can feel impersonal and bureaucratic, they are full of some of the most tender and surprising intimacies we may ever encounter; I think of the ICU nurse that your narrator becomes friends with. There is an exquisite passage near the end of your book where a tired doctor sits down with your narrator and, perhaps because she has had a difficult day, engages with him about the difficulties of his experience more fully than anyone has so far. It’s a fantastic exchange. Can you tell us more about this section—why you wrote it, if you always knew it would be there, what it means to you?
I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it.
GG This is one of those humanizing moments. The danger of bureaucracy is that it can occlude personhood: thinking about someone as a patient can get in the way of seeing them as a full human being. On one hand, I’m not sure there’s really a way to get around this, or even that we would want to get around it; if thinking of me as a piece of faulty machinery allows a surgeon, say, to intervene in a way that keeps me alive, think of me as faulty machinery! I don’t think we need everyone we interact with to behold us in the fullness of our complex humanity. Bureaucracy, routinization, efficiency—these all have their place. I don’t know where the right balance is—there isn’t a perfectly right balance, I’m sure—and I’m very glad that, as you said, my job as a novelist is to describe the problems as we live them, not to design solutions.
But even if those systems structure and limit the ways human beings relate to each other, they don’t entirely make human relating impossible. (Does anything?) A theme of all of my books is that any time two human beings have a face-to-face encounter, everything is possible—including cracks in bureaucracy, moments when two people can engage with each other as people. This is what the narrator feels in that moment with his surgeon, and he feels it happen more than once with Alivia, the nurse he spends the most time with. It felt important to me to have humanizing moments—not just because they’re moments where the narrator feels seen in a more adequate way but also because they’re moments when he sees, when the doctors and nurses become fuller human beings for him, too.
MO’R Some of the writing I admire most in Small Rain pertains to the narrator’s own discomfort in his body, and the gentle appreciation he comes to have for it. You’re written, previously, about eros; here, eros is replaced by thanatos—but also by a gentler emotion: tenderness. Is this a book, in some ways, about the problem—and perhaps redemption—of being a mind that inhabits a body?
GG Absolutely, yes. In some sense, the book is also a kind of biography of the narrator’s body, the way his body is itself a historical record. He has always had an antagonistic relationship with it: he’s taken it for granted, but more than that, he’s resented it, even hated it. There’s a crucial moment in the book, when the narrator is being bathed, that is among the most difficult things I’ve written. He looks at his body—which is covered in bruises and traces of adhesive, which has IVs and A-lines running into both arms—and, in describing it, comes to see his body as a suffering creature, as something available not just to the disgust and resentment he has always felt for it, but also to love. It’s a kind of revolution for him to think that, to see the possibility (even if it remains, for him, impossible) of a radically different relationship to his body.
MO’R Even as the novel keeps us almost claustrophobically inside the hospital, we learn a lot about L, the narrator’s boyfriend/partner, and how the two met and bought a house. Why did you include this interlude—which is a kind of reprieve from the hospital—in the book?
GG I guess I think one of the central questions of the book is domesticity—its pleasures and discontents and, more than that, whether it’s possible to remain attentive to the experience of long life with another—I mean whether it’s possible to resist growing numbed or deadened to one’s day-to-day experience. Certainly my narrator has stopped seeing his life in anything like its fullness. He takes it for granted, as he has come, at least in some ways—maybe not disastrous but not great, either—to take L for granted.
Then illness and pain take that life away from him—for a few days, at least, it seems entirely possible that he might die. The paradox is that in taking that life away, illness restores his life to him: it shocks him into attentiveness. You know, in my first two books, this narrator is very attached to a sense of his life as adventure—as geographic adventure (they’re books about an American abroad), and even more as erotic adventure. To be in his early forties, seven years into a long-term partnership, sharing a mortgage in a small midwestern town—from a certain perspective, that might seem like the opposite of adventure. But in the light of his own mortality, in that new attentiveness to his life this sickness gives him, he can recognize that domesticity is an adventure too.
MO’R The book is set during the pandemic and COVID politics play a role in setting up the atmosphere. Is the connection of the political and personal here important to you?
GG It is, and I think the explicit meditations on politics, and on life in a particular moment in America, are one way in which this book departs from my earlier work. I wanted to capture somehow, from the vantage of this hospital bed, in which an individual body is in terrifying, maybe terminal crisis, how the larger social body is in crisis too.
Or that’s how it seems to me now, looking back. As I was writing, I was just trying to capture what it felt like to be in a particular body in a particular place at a particular time—and that means, necessarily, thinking about the larger social world in which that body is situated. Late summer 2020 was tumultuous: COVID, bizarre anti-masking hysteria, the approaching election, Black Lives Matter protests. It felt as if the country was under immense stress, as if the idea of a common national project had shifted out of reach.
The narrator lives in a small blue town in a very red state. There’s no sealing himself off, as one can at least somewhat do in larger cities, from people who hold political beliefs that are repugnant to him. He’s also a newish homeowner. This makes him think about how we live with one another, and it makes him take seriously virtues he had maybe been disdainful of before, virtues of neighborliness: the meaningfulness of talking about the weather, of bringing somebody a batch of cookies when a storm has damaged their house. A certain kind of thinking sees the political as utterly suffusing existence, and I guess I think there’s a way in which that’s true. But the narrator comes to see that maybe it’s not the whole truth, and maybe the project of civilization, minimally conceived—the ability to live together without violence—depends on valuing spaces and ways of being with each other that de-emphasize explicit political allegiance. Some of the narrator’s neighbors are Trump voters. They’re still his neighbors.
MO’R As someone whose own work is invested in reimagining contemporary health care, restoring the ethic of care at the heart of it, I find myself hoping that doctors, nurses, and hospitalists read this book; certainly, I’ll be recommending it to them. Do you have any such hopes? Do you think Small Rain might help shine a light onto the human realities behind medical bureaucracy, or is such a consideration not present when you are shaping a narrative?
GG Writing is such a private act; for the years that I work on a book, I’m not thinking at all about who might read it. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. I sometimes think that the usefulness of art depends on a commitment to defending art’s uselessness. What I mean is that it’s only through an utter commitment to its own private, often formal or aesthetic ambition, however sealed off from utility it might seem, that art can become publicly useful—that it can “shine a light onto human realities,” in your beautiful phrase. I’m being vague; I’m not sure I can do better. Maybe what I mean is that we can never know how our books are going to be received, how they will be useful (or fail to be useful) to other people. The idea that we can know the effect of anything we make is always an illusion. But for art to have a chance of reaching other people at all it has to have integrity first and foremost as art.
The ambition of this book—to embody, as deeply and vividly and complexly as possible, the experience of being a particular embodied being in time—is a formal project. I never write with any utility, any lesson, in mind. Existence doesn’t offer lessons—though my narrator might be seeking them. But the experience of stepping into the light of another person’s existence—the experience art offers with a vividness and profundity unavailable elsewhere—can have profound effects. I do hope doctors and other care providers read this book. Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care.
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as three collections of poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review.
QUOTED: "When I do use my lived experience, I do so because it seems aesthetically compelling—beautiful or dramatic in a way that’s appealing. With that said, it’s also true that I use art to think about things in my own experience that are really bewildering. When I am completely bewildered by something, that’s when I know I have to write about it."
"I’ve been open about having a medical crisis similar to the narrator’s, but our experiences in the hospital are totally different and the kinds of intimate relationships he forms with the people who take care of him are totally fictional."
Art, Death, and the Meaning of Life: Garth Greenwell Tackles It All in His Latest Novel
With his first two novels, the author made his name as an unfiltered, intoxicating, alchemist of gay physicality. His third book, out today, sees him enter new territory.
Words
Adam Eli
September 3, 2024
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Photography by Oriette D’Angelo and courtesy of Garth Greenwell.
Garth Greenwell’s third novel, Small Rain, opens with the poet narrator experiencing a gut-wrenching pain that eventually lands him in the ICU at the height of Covid. Those familiar with the author's work won’t be surprised he’s writing about anguish and the body. His debut novel, What Belongs to You, explored the Venn diagram of those themes through the lens of a relationship between an American professor and a sex worker in Bulgaria. It established him as one of the great gay writers of our time, someone who paints the cocktail of pleasure, pain, and power that queerness invites with unabashed alacrity and almost cruel beauty.
Writing about his second book, Cleanness, fellow queer literary giant Alexander Chee described Greenwell as one who “maps the worlds our language walls off—sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar—and finds the sublime.” Small Rain, which comes eight years after Greenwell’s debut, is a departure for the 46-year-old author—in location (swapping Europe for the Midwest), length (his longest), and tone. To mark its release, I sat down with the writer to discuss the book’s preoccupation with meaning, his take on autofiction, and why making queer pride obligatory is a mistake.
Adam Eli: This book is different from your first two books in terms of content and vibe. The first two were a little more edgy and extremely sexy.
Garth Greenwell: It’s true that based on my first two books people thought of me as someone who writes about sex in a certain way, and I’m very happy to be thought of in that way. In this book, there is very little sex. Also, my first two books were about being an American abroad and the experience of foreignness. Not only is this book set in the United States, but in the American Heartland—a small Midwestern town.
With that said, the books are continuous because when I step back and ask myself what I’m really writing about, the answer is always, “How do human beings make meaning?” Sex is one way human beings make meaning. Love is a way human beings make meaning. Religion is a way human beings make meaning. And art is a way human beings make meaning. This is a book about someone who in his early 40s is struck down by a really scary, potentially fatal medical crisis, and confronts questions that he didn’t anticipate confronting for another 20 years about the meaning of his life. His life has been a life devoted to art. The book asks, what is the value of that?
small-rain-book
Image courtesy of MacMillan Publishers.
Eli: People are obsessed with knowing which parts of books are inspired by the author’s real life, especially for queer and female authors. I am not interested in which aspects of Small Rain are inspired by your real life, but I am interested to hear your thoughts about the differences between autofiction, memoir, and novel.
Greenwell: Autofiction is a term I feel super alienated from. I kind of think the term itself is bogus. Using one’s own experience as found material, which one can transform, recontextualize, and surround with invention, is the oldest game in literature. The tradition of writing that I’m working within goes back to Saint Augustine. The philosopher Charles Taylor talks about Saint Augustine as the origin point for the idea that within any particular experience can be found a meaning that is universal. The idea that there is something new, marketable, and therefore faddish in a certain kind of writing that combines lived experience with invention and essayistic writing doesn’t make any sense to me.
It’s always been clear to me that, even though there are certain portions of my books that hew pretty close to my lived experiences, I am not writing memoir. I am writing fiction. If you call something nonfiction, you’re establishing an important contract with the reader that you’re not going to make things up in that way. If I call something nonfiction, then I am going to do my best to write in a way that bears an allegiance to an objective fact-checkable reality, and if I depart from that, I’d make those departures very clear to the reader. In writing fiction, I have no allegiance to that kind of shared reality.
When I do use my lived experience, I do so because it seems aesthetically compelling—beautiful or dramatic in a way that’s appealing. With that said, it’s also true that I use art to think about things in my own experience that are really bewildering. When I am completely bewildered by something, that’s when I know I have to write about it. I’ve been open about having a medical crisis similar to the narrator’s, but our experiences in the hospital are totally different and the kinds of intimate relationships he forms with the people who take care of him are totally fictional.
I keep waiting for somebody to point out, in the irate way that people sometimes point out these things, that in a real ICU there would never be a single nurse who would be so present, because it would involve one nurse doing too many shifts. But I wanted to explore the relationship that forms between a caregiver and a patient, and having one nurse more present allowed me to do that.
Eli: Earlier this year, I saw you in conversation with Édouard Louis, and you said something so brilliant about shame that really resonated with me. It pertained to the idea that, growing up, if your shame had been removed there would be nothing else left of you.
Greenwell: I think we were talking about this idea that there is an original, pure self beneath that shame, beneath homophobia, beneath these learned things. I don’t believe that, because growing up in Kentucky in the ’80s, there was nothing except shame for me to make a self out of—until I found opera at 14. But by then I was already a self, I had learned so many things, I was having sex, etc. I needed shame because what else could I have made a self out of? The idea that we can find a pure self by erasing shame, violence, and homophobia rings utterly false to me.
The question should not be, How do I get rid of this shame? That way lies madness. Instead, the question should be, What can I do to make shame not simply a negative repressive force in my life? How can I make something productive of it? That is the great genius of queer people. The history of queer art is taking stigma and turning it into style, into solidarity, into pleasure. Those all seem to me like radically productive uses for shame. I think it’s a mistaken impulse to want to deny shame, to make a kind of pride obligatory. Like all attempts to repress genuine feelings, it can make us monstrous.
But if instead we can view shame as a productive way to create beauty and change in the world, then I feel very grateful to shame. Without it, I would not be an artist. I would not be someone capable of love in the way that I am. I would not be recognizable to myself had I not been shaped by certain lessons, the legitimacy of which I absolutely reject. And yet I never get to be someone who wasn’t taught those lessons.
QUOTED: "Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life."
Greenwell, Garth SMALL RAIN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $28.00 9, 3 ISBN: 9780374279547
Greenwell, who has written so evocatively about desire and sex inWhat Belongs to You (2016) andCleanness (2020), now probes something quite different: life-threatening illness.
With no warning and a violent eruption of pain so intense it felt like someone "plunged a hand into [his] gut and grabbed hold and yanked," the narrator suffers an infrarenal aortic dissection--a tear of the inner layer of his aorta. It's a sometimes fatal malady that usually happens to people older than the narrator, who's in his 40s. Deeply reluctant during the pandemic to go to the hospital in Iowa City, he endures the pain at home until his partner, L, convinces him to get treatment. The medical staff is alarmed, and also titillated, by encountering such a rare malady. The narrator of this autofiction endures lab test after lab test and must learn how to be powerless--how, for example, to refrain from using the bathroom near his ICU bed by himself or how to walk there without tangling the many wires and IV lines threaded from his body. As usual in a Greenwell novel, the tangents are tantalizing, and with so much time spent inert and left to ponder, the narrator finds his imagination flying beyond his hospital bed to the fracturing of his family, his life with and love for L, and the implications of their disastrous home renovations. But this is a novel about bodies and how weird they are, and Greenwell often returns to thinking about them. "What a strange thing a body is," he writes, " and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well." There's more suspense here than in Greenwell's previous work, as the reader is eager to discover the outcome of the narrator's illness: How will he get out of the ICU and return to life?
Greenwell--such a finely tuned, generous writer--transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Greenwell, Garth: SMALL RAIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=99c623ce. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work."
By Garth Greenwell
The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others' suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain (FSG, $28, 9780374279547), Garth Greenwell's moving yet unsentimental third novel.
Greenwell's unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.
L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that "on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale." After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.
To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, "I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that," it's only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.
Garth Greenwell's moving yet unsentimental third novel follows a poet's terrifying stay in the ICU, and explores the need for empathy in a fragile world.
As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator's ailment, but that's really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator's distress call with "We do have other patients," to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
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Magras, Michael. "Small Rain." BookPage, Sept. 2024, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808547387/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=09657f8b. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
Garth Greenwell takes on pain and illness in his new novel, ''Small Rain.''
SMALL RAIN, by Garth Greenwell
There may be many great poems about being an overweight kid at the seashore, but I am aware of only one: ''On Home Beaches,'' by Les Murray. The line that destroys me is the one in which the poet recalls being a ''red boy, holding his wet T-shirt off his breasts.''
The unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell's third novel, ''Small Rain,'' loves Murray's poem, too. He's had stretch marks and ''three rolls of flesh'' on his stomach since he was a child. ''For years even with lovers I refused to take off my shirt,'' he says, ''and I'm not sure I can remember ever being shirtless outside; it's ridiculous how much the thought horrifies me.''
He's a poet and a teacher who lives in Iowa City with his lover, L, who's also a poet (and a more successful teacher). They're renovating an old house. L is from Spain; they alternate days speaking in English and Spanish. They are bohemian lovebirds in mellow early-middle age, stranded almost happily in the Midwest.
One day the narrator experiences, out of the blue, annihilating physical pain, as if ''someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked.'' He's taken to the E.R. and then the I.C.U. This is the Covid era, and there are persistent delays and fears. He waits and waits for a diagnosis. His case is so unusual that specialists clamor to meet him, as if he were a candidate for a medical mystery column.
What he has, it turns out, is an infrarenal aortic dissection -- a tear in the inner wall of his aorta. These can snuff you and are difficult to treat. They are usually seen in older people (the narrator is in his 40s) and those with comorbidities.
Most of ''Small Rain'' takes place in the hospital, where the narrator, with pills down his throat and tubes up his nose, wonders what will happen next, and if he will make it out alive. There is the usual humbling slapstick of bathroom visits and I.V.s and exploratory needle jabs. There is little talk about who will pay for these treatments. The narrator is surely in line for an invasive procedure Tony Soprano might call a walletdectomy.
You would think that illness, and the world that surrounds it, would be primal territory for Greenwell. His two previous novels, ''What Belongs to You'' (2016) and ''Cleanness'' (2020), were frank explorations of the body's workings and urges. You felt the force of other people fully met in his pulverizing gay sex scenes. Both novels were so gleaming with erotic phosphorescence that they might have been retitled, for their paperback editions, ''Best American Sex Writing 2016'' and ''Best American Sex Writing 2020.''
There is little lovemaking in ''Small Rain,'' though awareness of desire filters in at the margins. For example, the sentence I quoted above, about disliking being shirtless, ends this way: ''I've learned there are men turned on by it, in back rooms and bathrooms, when I let men press their faces into my stomach and chest, sucking on my nipples or burrowing under my arms.''
The good news about ''Small Rain'' is that medical sagas, like heist movies, have layers of built-in drama. The novel's abiding theme is isolation, intensified by Covid, by social media and especially by illness, which one must go through alone even when surrounded by friends and family.
The bad news is that, in its slow piling on of medical minutiae over more than 300 pages, ''Small Rain'' listlessly drifts. The narrator is trapped in a hospital bed, and we are strapped in beside him. Reading this interminable novel is like watching a competitive bicyclist, before a race, depilate his legs hair by hair.
Greenwell's narrator does not get much distance on his condition; his reflections on his experience are mostly so mundane that they hardly count as reflections at all. There is little humor, and this lack gives the book a passive quality. (Gallows humor is frequently the best part of illness stories.) The reader gets the sense that Greenwell is not on top of this material so much as the material is on top of him.
His sentences are long and strung with clauses and subclauses; the paragraphs and chapters are long as well. Each page is a tall palisade one must climb slowly down, with little hope of a place for eyes and wits to rest.
I have left things out. There are sections on the narrator's difficult childhood and his estrangement from members of his family. There is some observant talk about music and about poetry. A construction fiasco is memorably described. He is touchy about being from Kentucky.
The narrator hangs on, like Harold Lloyd on a clock's hand. He learns to bear more fully his own mortality. His weight does not seem to be a cause of his torn artery lining. One possibility is late-stage syphilis. He contracted the disease many years earlier but had no symptoms.
This book's title is taken from a 16th-century song called ''Westron Wynde'' that has a line about the falling of ''the smalle rayne.'' The song trails a literary lineage behind it.
Madeleine L'Engle titled her semi-autobiographical 1945 novel ''The Small Rain,'' and Thomas Pynchon placed the same title, in 1959, atop his first published story. ''Westron Wynde'' has been mentioned or quoted in novels by Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and others.
It gives me no pleasure to find so little pulse in ''Small Rain.'' I'm a Greenwell fan. Can a misfire be a blessing in disguise? As the great Max Beerbohm put it, a man whose career is always great ''does sorely try our patience.''
SMALL RAIN | By Garth Greenwell | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 306 pp. | $28
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This article appeared in print on page BR14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Garner, Dwight. "Alive and Unwell." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Sept. 2024, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810432310/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ea58452. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of 'pure life', and the wonder of paying attention to details."
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Picador, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 320
Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover's hand or the frisson of something much darker--the spit, the slap of a BDSM session--could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the 'shock' of when a nurse 'softly stroked or rubbed my ankle'.
But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain--like 'someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked'. After suffering an aortic tear, the narrator finds himself in a disorienting world of beeping machines and doctors visiting at all hours. We then track his spell as a patient in ICU.
Set in 2020 during the pandemic, the novel is necessarily restricted. The action is confined to a hospital bed, with IV lines and drips preventing its narrator from moving freely. There are few characters: a friendly doctor, and another unable to conceal her excitement at being involved in such an 'interesting' case; a kind, caring nurse, and her slapdash counterpart. The narrator has a partner, identified only as L, who visits him in the afternoons. Their intimacy is somewhat inhibited by the masks they wear.
This is a novel of detail, describing scans and the difficulty of performing simple bodily tasks. But it expands far beyond its notional restrictions. Hospital days act as an anchor for the narrator's reminiscences about his past life in Bulgaria, his love of poetry and his home life with L--the 'little graces' of flowers, teapots and domesticity. The narrative is saturated with references to literature. A poem by George Oppen about a sparrow is remembered when the narrator looks out of his window; sonnets by Shakespeare and aubades by John Donne rattle around the inside of the PET-scan machine. When pain makes speech impossible, the words of others need to be borrowed.
We end up back outside the hospital; but much has changed. This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of 'pure life', and the wonder of paying attention to details.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Peacock, Francesca. "The consolation of poetry." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10232, 5 Oct. 2024, p. 33. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812312302/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=618212f3. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
KINKStoriesEdited by R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell
A tweet that's haunted me (and there are many) is one that reads, ''Most of sex is committing to the bit.'' Good sex, yes, is full of tacit and explicit agreements, the central one being sex itself -- the veil that can be drawn over partners, the temporary worlds built together, the setting of the stage.
I thought of that tweet often while reading ''Kink,'' a new anthology of short, sexual fiction compiled by R. O. Kwon, the author of ''The Incendiaries,'' and Garth Greenwell, the author of ''Cleanness.''
''Kink'' is not quite erotica. Ostensibly, it's more about the transformative nature of kink as a practice, and the different modalities -- kink as anticipation, as communication, as processing, as a mind-eraser, as an anchor, as a code, as freedom -- it can unleash. The collection contains a diverse selection of writing (races, ethnicities, gender identities and sexualities of all types are represented) but, strangely, its portrait of kink itself is relatively uniform (nearly all the stories take kink to mean B.D.S.M.). As Kwon and Greenwell write in the introduction, the book serves to ''recognize how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters -- questions of power, agency, identity -- can help us to interrogate and begin to rescript the larger cultural narratives that surround us.''
Thus begins our erotic education.
At times reading ''Kink'' felt like having a mirror turned on me. In my reading, I kept thinking: ''What is kink, anyway? Do I participate?'' I put down the book, texted friends, revisited memories. Ultimately, this seems to be the collection's point: to prompt a revisitation of the transgressive, a consideration, or insertion, of the self.
Alexander Chee, in a story about a successful Friendster date, writes movingly about kink as a measure of progress, the first step toward yourself. At one point in the story, the protagonist thinks of his ex-boyfriend, who had asked to be tied up: ''He wanted me to be someone dirtier and more aggressive than I was then. He wanted me to be the person I felt myself becoming now.'' The now is with a new man, revisiting kink, fuller and readier than before.
Vanessa Clark's story about sex in a ''drag transsexual nightclub'' is at the same time deeply romantic and deliciously filthy, prompting my favorite line in the anthology, a description that, days later, I can still feel on my tongue.
And in the last story, called ''Emotional Technologies,'' Chris Kraus makes the case for the inherent performance of kink, writing about the ''experimental theater'' within sadomasochism. ''In a disembodied floating space, S/m offers little pockets of theatricality and connection. So long as they are playing, two people are totally accountable and listening to each other.''
Some stories, like handcuffs, are sturdier than others. Many are flimsy and ineffective, relying too much on an obvious exchange of power, or keeping the concept of kink on too short a leash. Other people's dreams are rarely interesting to hear; the same holds true for listening to other people's kinks, at least in this collection.
Still, stories by Roxane Gay and Brandon Taylor each stayed with me after reading: Gay elegantly writes about the depths -- the emotional plunge -- of kink; Taylor wittily moves through its complications.
Garth Greenwell wrote the only story, for all my sexual aptitude, that made me squawk out loud. His story, a sprawling, moving, upsetting, confusing, exciting tale of submission, domination and resolution, portrays the hunger that we all must feed -- through kink, through sex, through whatever intimacy works for us. ''Who knows why we take pleasure in such things,'' Greenwell writes, about a certain sex act, but also about sex -- kink -- intimacy -- itself. ''It's best not to look into it too closely.''
Jazmine Hughes is a Metro reporter for The Times and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. KINK Stories Edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell 271 pp. Simon & Schuster. Paper, $17.
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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Lydia Ortiz FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
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Hughes, Jazmine. "Safe Words." The New York Times Book Review, 14 Feb. 2021, p. 17(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651703330/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b1621bd4. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "This visionary anthology successfully explores the range of sexual potency in the characters' power plays."
Kink
Edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon.
Simon & Schuster, $17 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-9821-1021-5
Greenwell and Kwon deliver on their promise to "take kink seriously" in this enticing, wide-ranging collection that plumbs the depths of desire and control. Several passages capture the delicate nature of dominant/submissive relationships--"I think you have the capacity to hurt me the way I need you to," says a submissive woman after a marriage proposal in Roxane Gay's "Reach"; "Dee needed to be in control to give up control," reflects the narrator of Kim Fu's "Scissors"--and the euphoria that can come from punishment, as in Greenwell's "Gospodar," in which a dominant "master" humiliates the gay male narrator by undermining his masculinity. The strongesr entries tend to be the naughtiest. Among them, Alexander Chee's "Best Friendster Date Ever" captures the "rich shame and defiant pleasure" of a kinky sexual encounter; Kwon's "Safeword" follows how a married couple rejuvenate their sex life by visiting a dungeon; and Peter Mountford's "Impact Play" finds a fetish-loving couple attending a Kinkfest before a family visit. But Brandon Taylor's understated "Oh, Youth," about an aging, rich married couple and the young man they hire to live with them for the summer, is perhaps the most transgressive. This visionary anthology successfully explores the range of sexual potency in the characters' power plays. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"Kink." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 43, 26 Oct. 2020, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A642920462/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2fbf8572. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Intimate and wide ranging in every sense" "the script-flipping, heart-skipping stories."
Kink.
Ed. by R. O. Kovun and Garth Greenwell.
Feb. 2021. 272p. Simon & Schuster, $17 (9781982110215).
In their introduction to this sweeping collection of short stories, most never before published, Greenwell (Cleanness, 2020) and Kwon (The Incendiaries, 2018) write, "By taking kink seriously, these stories recognize how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters--questions of power, agency, identity--can help us to interrogate and begin to re-script the larger cultural narratives that surround us." In addition to pieces from its coeditors, the book boasts a star-studded lineup: Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado, Chris Kraus, Brandon Taylor, and more. In Larissa Pham's "Trust," a woman is reluctant to share her most tender desire on a remote weekend getaway. Vanessa Clark brings a nineties Times Square nightclub, and the two people who meet up there, to pulsing life in "Mirror, Mirror." Kraus' "Emotional Technologies" places a woman's explorations into sadomasochism alongside considerations of romance, philosophy, and experimental theater. Intimate and wide ranging in every sense, the script-flipping, heart-skipping stories gathered here speak to and across one another, conveying truths of desire, experience, and selfhood as only literature can.--Annie Bostrom
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Bostrom, Annie. "Kink." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2021, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650392958/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b4f5c03b. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Greenwell's prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator's first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions. None of the reporting may be as it seems, as it's not clear whether the voice telling the tales is reliable or not. Yet through it all, the narrator reveals himself in flashes. It's a bit like sitting next to a well-spoken, heartbroken (but pretending he's not) passenger on an overnight bus who blathers on and on, but in the end, you find him fascinating."
Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pages. $26.
"IT DOESN'T MATTER if we win or lose," states a Bulgarian proverb. "Either way, we're getting drunk." This attitude--to stoically accept whatever life may bring--is a viewpoint reflected in Cleanness, the haunting and poetic new novel by Garth Green well.
After the publication of his first novel, What Belongs to You, Greenwell was praised as a literary Wunderkind. The book won the British Book Award's Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than fifty publications in nine countries. Now, in Greenwell's second novel, the Kentucky native once again describes a queer expatriate's quotidian interactions while living and working in Sofia, Bulgaria. As in What Belongs to You, the narrator hails from the American South, teaches high school English, and searches for intimate connections in his spare time.
In both books, the narrator is romantically linked to a college exchange student from Portugal named R. who, while a minor character in the first book, takes center stage in Cleanness. Divided into three parts, the novel focuses on how the storyteller somnambulates through a life altered by finding and losing love. The first and last sections, though clearly post-relationship, are ambiguous in their chronology. Both of these sections are left unnamed, while the middle section is titled "Loving R."
In the first chapter, called "Mentor," narrator meets one of his high school students, who tells the older teacher about discovering first love. An ethical red line keeps the narrator from physically reaching out to the student in a passage that raises the theme of forbidden touching. Another leitmotif is the impact of the impermanence of love. The narrator says: "He would be all right, I thought again, comforting myself by thinking it, though I thought too that he wasn't altogether mistaken in what he had said, that there would be loss in loving another, that the perspective that limited his grief would also limit his love, which, having taken the measure of its bounds, he could never again imagine as boundless."
"Gospodar," a term of Slavonic origin meaning "master" or "lord," is the name of the second chapter. In this story, the narrator assumes the role of a submissive sexual partner during a BD/SM tryst with a man who insists upon calling him "kuchko," or "bitch." The scene goes awry. Still, the encounter delivers its intended purpose: "It was for this excitement I had come, something to draw me out of the grief I still felt for R.; he had left months before, long enough for grief to have passed but it hadn't passed, and I found myself resorting again to habits I thought I had escaped, though that's the wrong word for it, escaped, given the eagerness with which I returned to them." The following chapter, "Decent People," details the narrator's attendance at an anticorruption rally. There, he mentions the gay poet Frank O'Hara for the second time. O'Hara's poetry, often intimate in tone and content, has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary." Like the chapters in this book.
Then begins the middle section, "Loving R." In the fourth chapter, "Cleanness," the narrator and R. meet at a restaurant during a time when a "horrible wind" with "something almost malevolent about it" covers Sofia with sand from Africa. Then, in "The Frog King," the lovers fly to Bologna for New Year's Eve because it was the "cheapest place we could fly." Finally, in "A Valediction," R., having left Sofia to finish his university degree back in Portugal, returns to Bulgaria for an extended visit.
Part III begins with "Harbor," in which, at a Bulgarian-American writers' conference by the sea, the narrator contemplates the "break" he and R. have decided to take. "Little Saint" offers a mirror image of the previous sexual liaison. The narrator meets a submissive who calls himself a "no limits whore" and requires only that whoever wants to fuck him do so without a condom. Finishing the book is "An Evening Out," which sees the narrator, scheduled soon to leave the Balkans and return to the U.S., meeting a group of former students. Unlike earlier, on this outing the unnamed storyteller allows himself to touch intimately one of the young men.
Greenwell's writing is like The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. At first, it's an undecipherable, sometimes maddening, brainteaser. But with persistent effort to uncover the key, plus a little patience, the end result is more than satisfying. The intellectual and artistic reward can feel like a rapturous joy. Greenwell eschews the use of quotation marks in lines of dialogue to identify different speakers. Sentences and descriptive passages may be lengthy, as if the reader had stumbled upon the private journal of a lonely writer who took copious, stream-of-consciousness notes about his life. The accounts portrayed on some pages seems dull, while on others they're electro-charged with descriptions of rough sex. Names are not given to most of the characters. Instead, they're referred to by a single letter of the alphabet. One wonders at first if "N." in the ninth chapter is the same individual as "N." in the seventh. (It turns out they are not.).
Greenwell's prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator's first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions. None of the reporting may be as it seems, as it's not clear whether the voice telling the tales is reliable or not. Yet through it all, the narrator reveals himself in flashes. It's a bit like sitting next to a well-spoken, heartbroken (but pretending he's not) passenger on an overnight bus who blathers on and on, but in the end, you find him fascinating.
My main issue with the book, and it's a minor one, concerns its title. In the queer world, too many gay men--sometimes insultingly, sometimes thoughtlessly--refer to those infected with HIV as "dirty" and the uninfected as "clean." To my relief, the connection between the title and the book has nothing to do with that connotation and everything to do with R.: "Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did."
The book concludes at the end of an alcohol-soaked night, the narrator riding home in a taxi while drunkenly musing on his life and time in his host country. How very Bulgarian.
Court Stroud works in Spanish-language media and lives in New York City with his husband, comic Eddie Sarfaty, and their two cats.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
http://glreview.org
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Stroud, Court. "Dark Nights of Sofia." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 27, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2020, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A618030740/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=04458f9b. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating. What distinguishes him is an ability to make sex on the page genuinely dramatic, by integrating its motions and sensations into the established stakes of the narrative."
CLEANNESS
GARTH GREENWELL
240pp. Picador. 14.99 [pounds sterling].
Early in Cleanness, Garth Greenwell's second novel, the nameless narrator praises the poet Frank O'Hara. Most gay writers produce tragic visions, he says, but O'Hara expresses an unbridled joy based in "freedom from guardedness and guilt". It's easy to see why this quality is so attractive to the narrator. From a young age, he has sought a life "scrubbed of shame". But in his quest to realize something of O'Hara's joy, he must reckon with the volatility of identity, for desire always threatens to destabilize what's solid about us, and collapse us into our opposites.
Readers of Greenwell's highly praised debut, What Belongs to You (2016), will already be familiar with the narrator of Cleanness, a thoughtful young gay man teaching literature in Sofia, Bulgaria. His voluptuously long sentences owe something to Henry James, and Greenwell also shares that writer's fascination with expatriate life. Rather than thrusting an American into the beau monde of Western Europe, however, he sets his narrator in the ruins of a post-communist state that, even decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, is still searching for a coherent identity.
As in James, this broader cultural backdrop is important to understanding Greenwell's characters. Cleanness covers the period of the Arab Spring, during which people overthrew their oppressors and cleaved to the hope of a better future. Protests also flared in Bulgaria, and the nation's struggle to "take the voice of a crowd and turn it into ... the voice of a people" mirrors the narrator's own turmoil, as he strives to transform the multitudes within him into a unified self.
What Belongs to You is centred on the narrator's relationship with Mitko, a beautiful, sensual and deeply troubled Bulgarian, and their mercurial love powered the novel's narrative. Cleanness doesn't have a focus of that kind, and it isn't a clear sequel; Mitko isn't even mentioned, and there's very little overlap. The chapters in the new novel proceed rather like stories, linked together by key thematic concerns.
The master/servant dynamic is one such concern. At the outset of the novel, the narrator visits a man he's contacted, probably off the internet, for a night of dominant sex. He calls the man "Gospodine", the Bulgarian word for master (a name his students use for him at school). "I want to be nothing", he declares, for only in self-annihilation can he be "stripped clean of will". But when the master wants to have sex with him without a condom, the narrator baulks, and is raped in an instant of terrifying alienation: "I cried out in a voice I had never heard before, a shrill sound ... that wasn't my voice at all". We are reminded that a flight from the self is a flight into the unknown, and that carries tremendous risk.
Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating. What distinguishes him is an ability to make sex on the page genuinely dramatic, by integrating its motions and sensations into the established stakes of the narrative. There is a very profound sequence of this kind in the middle section of Cleanness, which covers the period of the narrator's relationship with R., a Portuguese man. R. has just told the narrator about being molested as a child, which has left him with a permanent confusion about his sexual identity: "how can I know what's me and what he did to me?" In the aftermath of this revelation, the two make love, and to the narrator's surprise, R. wants to reverse their usual roles; he wants to be penetrated. What's more, he doesn't want the narrator to use a condom. "It was like a new intimacy", the narrator says, "though maybe there was something cruel in it as well, some cruelty in myself
I sensed the shape of, a shape I had sensed before but never before with R." While maintaining the necessary erotic charge of the scene, Greenwell allows us to perceive how personal history courses through every gesture.
If the book is imagined as a body, then cleanness --a total lack of shame in putting sexual passion on the page--is what it achieves in these refreshing depictions. In one brilliant passage, Greenwell even redeems pornographic language itself: "I urged him on, I said That's right, suck that cock, the language of porn that's so ridiculous unless you're lit up with a longing that makes it the most beautiful language in the world, full of meaning, profound".
In his relationship with R., the narrator finds wholeness and contentedness--at least briefly. "I wanted to be settled in a single place", he says of this period, and to believe in "the impossibility of change". But Cleanness is a novel in which only "passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors" are possible, and everything solid, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be in flux. While visiting Bologna with R., for instance, the narrator observes a painting that seems at first unremarkable, just a pitcher and some cups. And yet, he says, "What I took at first for blocks of color dissolved when I leaned in, were modulated, textured, full of movement somehow". This same illusion, of stillness and movement at once, operates on the self, and makes even the firmest relationship fluid.
The final section finds the narrator in the wake of the dissolution of his relationship with R. Greenwell doesn't linger over the exact moment of the break, but we've gradually seen the narrator grow hostile to the sort of stillness he once desired. "I couldn't keep living the same day again and again," he says, "I wanted a new life too."
In this new life, the narrator falls into a relationship with a young man he nicknames "Svetcheto", the little saint. Cleanness always draws our attention to reversals of identity, and in this relationship the narrator, who began the novel wanting to be nothing, assumes the dominant position. The promiscuous little saint desires "to be a hole", and allows virtually anyone to have sex with him, not caring about their appearance, not even caring about disease. If it was fear of disease that held the narrator back from pure servitude earlier in the book, Svetcheto has no such inhibition. He is truly free.
It's the little saint who comes into sharpest focus in Cleanness. At times, the narrator and R. seem slightly diffuse, soft around the edges (they are, after all, unnamed), but the little saint can be captured on the page precisely because he "embodied so fully his fantasy of himself". Unlike the narrator, who seems at best to achieve an uneasy tension with what he calls "our dreams of ourselves", Svetcheto lives a "life of wholeheartedness". In this man, literally unclean but scrubbed of shame, the narrator is astonished to find the poetic, pornographic freedom of O'Hara. It is a glorious, affirmative vision. And then they fuck.
To buy Cleanness at a discount, visit shop.thetls.co.uk or call +44 (0)203 176 2935
Michael LaPointe has written for the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and writes the "Dice Roll" column for the Paris Review. He lives in Toronto
Caption: Posters from Sofia Pride, Bulgaria
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Lapointe, michael. "Ridiculous, unless lit up: Garth Greenwell's flights of freedom." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6105, 3 Apr. 2020, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631647657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8e9608dc. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative."
Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-12458-8
A young American teacher's reckonings with intimacy and alienation compose the through line of Greenwell's elegant and melancholy volume (after What Belongs to You). Nine stories track the unnamed narrator, who teaches literature in Bulgaria's capital, Sofia. Documenting the narrator's relationship with R., a Portuguese university student, and its dissolution, the stories are touchstones in his emotional development, from an attempt to shepherd a student through the crisis of first love in "Mentor," to an encounter with homophobia in the midst of an outpouring of national solidarity in "Decent People." As the teacher's hopes of a life with R. fade, he returns to sex with men he meets online, which proves both dangerous, as in the chilling "Gospodar," and revelatory, as in his encounter with the self-abnegation of the young man he calls Svetcheto, "Little Saint." Unresolved regarding his own character, "how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek," the narrator struggles to guide the young people he teaches, conscious of the chasm of experience and expectation between them. Greenwell writes about sex as a mercurial series of emotional states and is lyrical and precise in his descriptions of desires and motivations he suggests are not subject to control or understanding. This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Cleanness." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 42, 21 Oct. 2019, p. 48. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605200701/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dd39428. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "The simple beauty of the writing is something to behold."
Greenwell, Garth CLEANNESS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $26.00 1, 14 ISBN: 978-0-374-12458-8
Greenwell depicts the emotionally haunted life of an expatriate American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria--who seems to be the same unnamed character who narrated his highly praised debut novel, What Belongs to You (2016).
At the heart of that last novel was Mitko, a gay hustler who fueled the narrator's pained desire, then disgust, and ultimately empathy, but he doesn't appear here. The narrator pushes more sexual boundaries this time, and Greenwell admirably pushes them too by depicting those desires with an unflinching frankness. Sadomasochism, unprotected sex, the narrator's voyeuristic attraction to one of his students: They are all elements of the story, portrayed in Greenwell's precise, elegant style. The narrator's experience seems to align with Greenwell's; the writer has acknowledged the autofictional nature of his writing. Depictions of rough sex bookend the novel, but it's the narrator's relationship with Portuguese student R., who appeared briefly in What Belongs to You, that occupies most of Greenwell's attention. Both marooned in Sofia, the men are happy together until they acknowledge the futilities both of staying in Bulgaria and in a long-distance relationship. One of Greenwell's talents is making everyday occurrences feel dramatic and full of ambivalence and nuance, but the scenes featuring the relationship at the heart of the novel suffer a bit in comparison to the dramatic sex depicted in other sections. Still, the simple beauty of the writing is something to behold. Here he is evoking a wind from Africa that assaults Sofia: "There was something almost malevolent about it, as if it were an intelligence, or at least an intention, carrying off whatever wasn't secure, worrying every loose edge."
Brave and beautiful.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Greenwell, Garth: CLEANNESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A602487751/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ab35244f. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Greenwell performs a brave vivisection of the tangle of sexuality, violence, shame, and degradation within the self, rather than presenting queer life at its most appealing or reader-friendly."
CLEANNESS
GARTH GREENWELL
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$26 | 240 pp.
Garth Greenwell's second book of fiction consists of nine closely linked stories involving the narrator of his first novel, What Belongs to You. That book is about a queer American teaching literature at a prestigious school in Sofia, Bulgaria, still dealing with an upbringing that connected same-sex desire to shame, contamination, disgust, and dirt. In the basement men's room of the Sofia cultural center, he meets a handsome Bulgarian who makes his way in the world by having sex with foreigners in exchange for gifts. In their interactions over many months, we see the Bulgarian man's health and prospects go downhill while the narrator gradually discovers that he can be on the side of health. The novel's title suggests that the narrator is doing the difficult work of shaping his own boundaries and defining his own character, of determining what is properly his own. A key to the transformation is his mature, reciprocal relationship with R., a young Portuguese man who is in Sofia on a student-exchange program.
R. now becomes a central character in Cleanness and is explicitly made a marker of the narrator's health. "Sex had never been joyful for me before ... it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did." Yet he keeps finding a profound aspect of himself that is unmoved by the relationship with R. and that desires to return to scenes of erotic degradation and shame, ritual repetitions of his father's punitive disgust at his sexuality. Two of these scenes are described in such graphic detail that some readers will be put off. What makes them more than pornography is the way they deal with the experience of selfhood as a burden. At these moments the narrator explicitly wants to become nothing, to lose all sense of selfhood, will, and agency by becoming a pure object for another. Nietzsche compared the pain of individuation and self-consciousness to that of sea animals first feeling the terrible weight and awkwardness of their bodies as they emerged onto land. Ancient peoples commonly had rites for an ecstatic loss of self. That Greenwell has these in mind is suggested when his narrator goes to a writing conference on the Black Sea, to what was in ancient times a Roman city dedicated to Apollo. He notes how much he likes the sea, how you can lose yourself in it, how it drowns out thinking the way it drowns out noise. We are back with Nietzsche's contrast between Apollo-the god of beauty, form, and individuation--and the oceanic, individuality-swallowing, ecstatic Dionysus. As much as the narrator is made happier and "cleaner" by his relationship with R., he still has feelings that suggest that what really belongs to him, what provides his profoundest sense of self, is an ecstatic losing of himself in cruel, often degrading rituals. He and R. celebrate their devotion to beautiful form through a brief visit to lovely Venice, but at one point in that city he imagines he can see Aschenbach, from Death in Venice, emerging from the sea. Thomas Mann's character tried to maintain his rigid sense of identity through exhausting intellectual work, but his attraction to beautiful Apollinian form in the person of Tadzio soon gives way to an attraction to a world of disease and to the suggestion of ecstatic erotic rituals.
In one story, Sofia is beset by fierce winds carrying sand and dirt from Africa and Greece. The narrator and R. find small sheltered spaces for themselves in a cafe and an apartment, but the winds seem able not only to penetrate everywhere but also to underline the great ephemerality of everything except this pure, impersonal circulation, "picking things up and setting them down again willy-nilly, not just broken things but things that seem whole." When that Dionysian force bursts open their apartment window, the narrator finds himself expressing a touch of cruelty in his sexual treatment of R. and wonders again just how well he understands his own desires, just how much they are on the side of the "cleanness" he has been praising. The powerful winds, he notes, are bearing a world of trash and dirt, yet he seems to identify with their destructive force as much as with the fragile protected spaces he shares with R.
Finding it difficult to maintain their relationship after R. leaves Sofia, the narrator and R. take a trip to a town built around a Bulgarian fortress that fell to the Ottomans in 1393. A Delibes opera that had been a favorite of the narrator when he was an adolescent in Kentucky is being performed, to be followed by a grand light show that depicts the historic battle for the fortress. The narrator has criticized the Bulgarians for articulating their identity so often in terms of such ancient structures rather than finding a contemporary style of political identity. But the overall image system of the story suggests that he is not much different from them. Ancient psychological structures in him have a staying power that his personal relationships do not. The Bulgarians keep returning to memories of a time when their nation covered all of Thrace and reached expansively to three seas. The narrator also keeps finding himself attracted to a sense of self far more expansive than one limited to a particular relationship of everyday intimacy. As he says in another of the stories: "How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I've worn myself down to a bearable size." The performance of the opera from his adolescence turns out to be mediocre; the light show is evidently superficial, a play of brief, gaudy illuminations over an earlier world that remains unaffected by it. The title of this story is "Valediction" and the narrator is realizing that the trip is a ritual of finally letting go of R. after two years, though it seems clear that R. would like the narrator to try harder to continue the relationship. In a story called "The Frog King," a visit to Bologna at New Year's finds a great sculpture of a frog being burned to celebrate the putting aside of past misfortunes. But our narrator, it seems, is not up to this opportunity.
He admits that daily communication with R. by Skype is getting in the way of his writing. It is as a writer, and not in his relationship with R., that he ultimately thinks he must negotiate the deepest issues of selfhood that this book investigates. Greenwell often writes beautifully, with a quiet, compelling, carrying rhythm that suggests an unconscious labor of giving shape to the self. Nietzsche claimed that he was more courageous than most in doing a rigorous self-vivisection of his own psyche. Greenwell performs a brave vivisection of the tangle of sexuality, violence, shame, and degradation within the self, rather than presenting queer life at its most appealing or reader-friendly. One story portrays a political demonstration against the Sofia government, a protest where some anti-government demonstrators supposedly on the good side of things are happy to beat up those carrying the rainbow flags of the Gay Pride movement. He uses Whitman's poetry to suggest that an unconscious animal solidarity with crowds, a reminder of his own sexuality, must be joined to the ability to think. Greenwell's reflections generally move toward the politics of the inner psyche rather than the politics of Bulgaria, though he does capture the almost-complete crumbling of the Communist political legacy and the great physical ugliness it left behind in its buildings.
FRANK B. FARRELL is emeritus professor at Purchase College, State University of New York. His most recent book is How Theology Shaped Twentieth-Century Philosophy.
Caption: Garth Greenwell
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Commonweal Foundation
http://www.cweal.org/
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Farrell, Frank B. "Apollo's Not Enough." Commonweal, vol. 147, no. 5, May 2020, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630197833/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4f2acefc. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "The body is the medium of Greenwell's humanism. Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, he explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain—not through ascribing morality to sickness, but through our response to it."
Garth Greenwell is best known for autobiographical fiction about sex and the body, but with Small Rain, the American author now turns to the physicality of suffering. In sparse prose interspersed with occasional lyrical musings, a nameless poet is diagnosed with a small tear in his aorta, which results in a long stay in a clinic, where he shuffles from the ER to the ICU.
A strange pain takes over his life, becoming "a kind of environment, a medium of existence". This is the first of Greenwell's novels to be set in the US, in a hospital in Iowa. Set against the beginning of the Covid pandemic, it asks poignant questions about care, connectivity and community. What do we owe one another in "the project of being a human being"?
Greenwell is fascinated by our collective performance of morality. In Cleanness (2020) this often concerned questions of consent, nationhood and student-teacher relationships. Small Rain explores the need for platonic touch amid the depersonalisation that medical institutions require. A hospital novel offers a perfect setting to explore the body in a new context -- the narrator compares one procedure to the experience of doing poppers. The poet's time inside is slow and agonising, as Greenwell zooms in on the minutiae of care. His life is ruled by doctors whose names he can't recall; "the pain defied description". Some nurses are nicer than others, he discovers. Not everyone recognises the humanity of those in their care.
Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, he explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain
The body is the medium of Greenwell's humanism. Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, he explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain -- not through ascribing morality to sickness, but through our response to it.
Greenwell approaches the pandemic through a variety of perspectives: nurses struggling to make ends meet, their conspiracy-theorist uncles, siblings who don't always wear masks. The consequences could be severe if the immunocompromised narrator contracts Covid. Still, he tries to navigate the world lightly. When his sister doesn't always mask around him, he realises he has a choice -- to connect with her and take the risk, or to prioritise his own care. Greenwell doesn't valorise this decision; Covid isn't a crisis about personal choice, but about community. These interlacing vulnerabilities are the crux of Small Rain. When a nurse is kind and breaks the facade of professionalism, the narrator wells up.
At times, he feels a kind of moral paralysis. He watches the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings on TV and thinks about the Trump supporters in his family. Political discourse is "that weird intellectual weather". He tries to shield himself from the ideologies of separation, wondering how we can come together despite our differences. Sometimes this reads as a bit too romantic, leaning heavily into an amorphous ideal without touching on the history of disability and vulnerability.
Before he goes into hospital, the protagonist and his lover, L, are in a rhythm, or perhaps a rut. They work in the same house, in different rooms, every day. Sometimes the narrator wishes he could leave the stability of his teaching job and travel again. He goes on long digressions about how, when he bought the house, a storm nearly destroyed it. Community plays a part in this story, too: the people who come to check on him after the wind abates; the arborists who deal with the trees. These digressions, he realises, are part of life. These, and poetry, of course. He performs an extended reading of George Oppen's poem Stranger's Child. He attempts to steer his students away from "making a poem a puzzle they could solve".
Small, redemptive moments make life worth living. "Commonness didn't cancel wonder." A Snickers bar is a source of wonder, playing with a dog in a park is marvellous, the way lovers fit together is magical. "Maybe everyone feels the way I do," the narrator thinks, "that it takes an act of will to hang on to a life." Provisional truths, the marks of happiness, the nearness of death: these open us up. The doctors tell the narrator to move on, to treat his time in the hospital as an accident on the road of life, but of course pain leaves a mark too. Suffering's monotony isn't noble, Greenwell suggests, but something that teaches us how to live nonetheless.
* Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is published by Picador (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
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"Small Rain by Garth Greenwell review -- the lessons of pain; The author of Cleanness considers the physicality of suffering through the experiences of a poet hospitalised during Covid." Guardian [London, England], 4 Oct. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811170778/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d7ca1295. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
Garth Greenwell takes on pain and illness in his new novel, "Small Rain."
SMALL RAIN, by Garth Greenwell
There may be many great poems about being an overweight kid at the seashore, but I am aware of only one: "On Home Beaches," by Les Murray. The line that destroys me is the one in which the poet recalls being a "red boy, holding his wet T-shirt off his breasts."
The unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell's third novel, "Small Rain," loves Murray's poem, too. He's had stretch marks and "three rolls of flesh" on his stomach since he was a child. "For years even with lovers I refused to take off my shirt," he says, "and I'm not sure I can remember ever being shirtless outside; it's ridiculous how much the thought horrifies me."
He's a poet and a teacher who lives in Iowa City with his lover, L, who's also a poet (and a more successful teacher). They're renovating an old house. L is from Spain; they alternate days speaking in English and Spanish. They are bohemian lovebirds in mellow early-middle age, stranded almost happily in the Midwest.
One day the narrator experiences, out of the blue, annihilating physical pain, as if "someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked." He's taken to the E.R. and then the I.C.U. This is the Covid era, and there are persistent delays and fears. He waits and waits for a diagnosis. His case is so unusual that specialists clamor to meet him, as if he were a candidate for a medical mystery column.
What he has, it turns out, is an infrarenal aortic dissection - a tear in the inner wall of his aorta. These can snuff you and are difficult to treat. They are usually seen in older people (the narrator is in his 40s) and those with comorbidities.
Most of "Small Rain" takes place in the hospital, where the narrator, with pills down his throat and tubes up his nose, wonders what will happen next, and if he will make it out alive. There is the usual humbling slapstick of bathroom visits and I.V.s and exploratory needle jabs. There is little talk about who will pay for these treatments. The narrator is surely in line for an invasive procedure Tony Soprano might call a walletdectomy.
You would think that illness, and the world that surrounds it, would be primal territory for Greenwell. His two previous novels, "What Belongs to You" (2016) and "Cleanness" (2020), were frank explorations of the body's workings and urges. You felt the force of other people fully met in his pulverizing gay sex scenes. Both novels were so gleaming with erotic phosphorescence that they might have been retitled, for their paperback editions, "Best American Sex Writing 2016" and "Best American Sex Writing 2020."
There is little lovemaking in "Small Rain," though awareness of desire filters in at the margins. For example, the sentence I quoted above, about disliking being shirtless, ends this way: "I've learned there are men turned on by it, in back rooms and bathrooms, when I let men press their faces into my stomach and chest, sucking on my nipples or burrowing under my arms."
The good news about "Small Rain" is that medical sagas, like heist movies, have layers of built-in drama. The novel's abiding theme is isolation, intensified by Covid, by social media and especially by illness, which one must go through alone even when surrounded by friends and family.
The bad news is that, in its slow piling on of medical minutiae over more than 300 pages, "Small Rain" listlessly drifts. The narrator is trapped in a hospital bed, and we are strapped in beside him. Reading this interminable novel is like watching a competitive bicyclist, before a race, depilate his legs hair by hair.
Greenwell's narrator does not get much distance on his condition; his reflections on his experience are mostly so mundane that they hardly count as reflections at all. There is little humor, and this lack gives the book a passive quality. (Gallows humor is frequently the best part of illness stories.) The reader gets the sense that Greenwell is not on top of this material so much as the material is on top of him.
His sentences are long and strung with clauses and subclauses; the paragraphs and chapters are long as well. Each page is a tall palisade one must climb slowly down, with little hope of a place for eyes and wits to rest.
I have left things out. There are sections on the narrator's difficult childhood and his estrangement from members of his family. There is some observant talk about music and about poetry. A construction fiasco is memorably described. He is touchy about being from Kentucky.
The narrator hangs on, like Harold Lloyd on a clock's hand. He learns to bear more fully his own mortality. His weight does not seem to be a cause of his torn artery lining. One possibility is late-stage syphilis. He contracted the disease many years earlier but had no symptoms.
This book's title is taken from a 16th-century song called "Westron Wynde" that has a line about the falling of "the smalle rayne." The song trails a literary lineage behind it.
Madeleine L'Engle titled her semi-autobiographical 1945 novel "The Small Rain," and Thomas Pynchon placed the same title, in 1959, atop his first published story. "Westron Wynde" has been mentioned or quoted in novels by Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and others.
It gives me no pleasure to find so little pulse in "Small Rain." I'm a Greenwell fan. Can a misfire be a blessing in disguise? As the great Max Beerbohm put it, a man whose career is always great "does sorely try our patience."
SMALL RAIN | By Garth Greenwell | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 306 pp. | $28
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 International Herald Tribune
http://international.nytimes.com/
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Garner, Dwight. "The Endless Drama, and Tedium, of a Medical Mystery." International New York Times, 16 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808758327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=20b09708. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Small Rain is a pacey read, with Greenwell's style fluently reflecting the narrator's restless, lively thinking. Where one might expect a period one finds a comma or semicolon; where commas aren't strictly required, there are none. Long paragraphs and no quotation marks make the prose almost frictionless. It's a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical."
Life, what one might call the body plot, defies the traditional rules of storytelling. There's no art or logic to it: sickness blindsides us; the end is often sudden. Though we may refer to everyday misfortunes as tragedies or acts of God, âstuff happensâ is hardly Aristotle. Nor are our bodies vessels for morality tales; suffering is defiantly meaningless. Death, in the words of James Baldwin, âis the only fact we have.â Most of us would agree that this is a bleak, unsatisfying truth.
The narrative inadequacy of illness hovers over Garth Greenwell's profound third novel. âSmall Rainâ follows an unnamed narrator through a terrifying bodily event and his subsequent experiences in the intensive care unit of an Iowa City hospital in the summer of 2020. Though the narrator shares much of his author's biography, including a medical episode resembling the one in the book, Greenwell recently told New York Magazine that it's âin no way a transcription of my own experience.â What credence readers may give this statement is beside the point; Greenwell's âvague and shapelessâ time in the hospital, an experience that âoffered none of the satisfactions of narrative,â is transfigured in âSmall Rainâ into a paean to some of life's most meaningful pleasures.
After enduring days of agony, our hero caves to his partner L's pleas and goes to urgent care. âWhat you have is called an infrarenal aortic dissection,â a doctor tells him. On one level the book is a record of attempts to find the cause of this sickness. He's plugged into IVs and A-lines, scanned, prodded, injected, all the while relating his impressions with an unsentimental corporeal intimacy: âHow eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair.â (Greenwell's precise rendering of flesh recalls the sexual encounters of his fabulous earlier novels, âWhat Belongs to Youâ and âCleanness,â minus the eroticism.) The narrator is forced to confront the ruthlessness of the body plot laid bare: âThe whole metaphysical edifice, love and artmaking and thought, poetry and painting, the possibility of God, all of it rested on brute mechanism, on the body taking things in and processing them and voiding what it couldn't use.â
Brute and, as it turns out, fragile. Isn't everything? The narrator's encounter with precarity is echoed in the problems he encounters renovating his home - âthat single piece of wood is holding up your whole house,â a contractor tells him - not to mention its vulnerability in the face of climate change. (A violent derecho that damages the house really happened in August 2020.) Zooming further out, one might see in the narrator's person and house an allegory or fractal of the body politic, which, as he observes, is creaking under the pressures of protest, covid, polarization, âAmerican irrationality.â
Robust and vigorous, though, is the narrator's mind, which is animated by his needling anxieties about how to live even if he can never be sure he's doing the right thing. Twice he states that âthere are no arts of living.â But bed rest provides time for reflection, and in the end his relationship with L and what he takes from his study of poetry make him question this belief.
For our narrator, the sublime in poetry is in the detail. âThere are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems,â he argues. Musing on a medieval verse, he finds âthe first two lines unparsable: Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne, a sentence with a broken back.â But in the mysterious ânon-senseâ of these lines - âwhat is the small rain, isn't it beautiful, the weird adjective, how can rain be smallâ - he sees something âbottomless.â That's what art is, he suggests: âwe want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there's a kind of sense only non-sense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible.â And âsmall rainâ is just one of several gnomic phrases - âfalse lumen,â ânaked rock,â âpure lifeâ - that strike a mysterious chord in the narrator. The attentiveness they demand trains in him a sensitivity that lends his everyday life greater richness.
Though it likewise rewards close reading, âSmall Rainâ is a pacey read, with Greenwell's style fluently reflecting the narrator's restless, lively thinking. Where one might expect a period one finds a comma or semicolon; where commas aren't strictly required, there are none. Long paragraphs and no quotation marks make the prose almost frictionless. It's a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical. As in all great novels, its philosophical insights are spliced with details that root the work in a specific time and place but do nothing to diminish its timelessness. âSomething that I very desperately need from art is a reason to say yes to life,â Greenwell has said. In âSmall Rain,â he establishes a conflict, between the body plot and the resistant mind, that generates many such reasons. It satisfies his narrator's own precept that art âmakes the abyssal less abyssal.â
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Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
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Small Rain
By Garth Greenwell
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Arrowsmith, Charles. "Garth Greenwell's âSmall Rain' is a timeless work." Washington Post, 2 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A806899339/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66eb57f1. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "To the degree that Small Rain is another instalment in an unmaking and remaking of Garth Greenwell's writerly self, it offers a welcome call to action—to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew."
SMALL RAIN
GARTH GREENWELL
320pp. Picador. 18.99 [pounds sterling].
Garth Greenwell's third book, like his first two --What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (TLS, April 3, 2020)--is a work of autofiction that reflects on moments of crisis in the life of an artist. Where What Belongs to You followed its narrator (an aspiring writer) through the anomie of expatriate experience in Bulgaria (a theme reprised in several of the stories in Cleanness) and the pain of a tortured relationship, the crises in Small Rain are both more extreme and less exotic, centred on a life-changing medical emergency that strikes the narrator, a poet living in a small city in the American Midwest, during the early months of Covid, precipitating an extended stay in hospital.
The unnamed man (we'll call him G) experiences excruciating abdominal and groin pain. "Stoic or stupid", he lies in agony for eight hours, waiting for it to pass. It is August 2020, and "it does not occur to him that he can--or should--go to hospital", which "for months" he has regarded as among "the last places one would go for help". He does eventually drive himself to a clinic (his partner, L, a Spanish poet and professor, does not drive), and after hours of waiting is admitted to the emergency ward. Multiple tests later, he has a diagnosis: "infrarenal aortic dissection". There is a tear in his aorta, part of the inner wall of which has detached and is at risk of infection. He is lucky to have survived.
Isolated and scared, G is at the mercy of the professional kindness of strangers. He also finds he has time to reflect on the politics of intimacy in this moment of political partisanship. Students are about to return to in-person classes at the University of Iowa, where L teaches. G has only recently managed to persuade his mother, in her seventies and suffering from asthma, to take the Covid warnings seriously--over the protestations of G's Fox News-devoted sister. For "years", he reflects, "I had wondered at American irrationality, and never more than during the pandemic", when "American unreason" became "impossible to ignore ... had come to seem less aberrant, less a thing of the margins than at the heart of what we were, it had corroded the idealism that had always also been part of my sense of my country, I mean my sense of myself".
To the extent that the novel tracks the restoration of a sense of idealism, or at least the testing of the possibilities of its revitalization, the process is necessarily provisional, requiring patience and attention. And the only antidote to what G comes to call "the Discourse"--the "weird intellectual weather" in which we all find ourselves buffeted, "the amorphous impersonal sense of things that came from scrolling through social media"--is to be found in art. This is Small Rain's key argument --and Greenwell's great subject--made repeatedly, unapologetically, with the author staging a series of encounters through which his autofictional persona experiences its truth as epiphany.
G's first guides through the hospital underworld are medics with musical associations. Dr Ferrier reminds him of Kathleen Ferrier's Mahler recordings; one of the Ruckert-Lieder, in particular, had revealed to his teenage self how art might articulate something previously barely apprehended. It had "made me capable of some feeling I couldn't have felt before", become "part of that humanization art has been for me, which is something else it has become difficult to say, to say or believe, but I do believe it". With Frank, one of the first nurses to care for him after his diagnosis, G finds he shares a love of early music. Frank plays a recording of a John Taverner song, "Westron Wynde", from which the novel takes its title. The "authorless, mysterious" poem features a speaker in danger, setting his face to the wind as if desiring death. "The smalle rayne downe can Rayne", runs the second line--"a sentence with a broken back", G reflects. He rehearses how he had taught the poem to puzzled high-school students, its "cracked syntax" rendering it even more unsettling, confirming how a "poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible".
This apologia for poetry is expanded in the novel's fourth part. After new episodes of stabbing pain and amid the indignities of physical incapacity, G is moved by the sparrows visiting his window to recall George Oppen's poem "Stranger's Child", with its compressed, crystalline contemplations of sparrow, leaf and rock. "It wasn't a special poem, or not to anyone I knew of but me", G reflects, yet he "loved how, among the abstraction ... images became luminous, shards of the real, non-abstract world, occasions for wonder". His long exegesis confirms his sense of a developing tension in his treatment, which, despite "the particularizing attention of the doctors and nurses, all the precise data they collected from my specific body", feels entirely impersonal, "had nothing to do with me, really, left the crucial me unseen, untouched".
G's metaphorical language reveals the architectural imagination that illuminated What Belongs to You (one recalls the protagonist's epiphany at an ancient church amid the Communist-era brutalism on the edges of Sofia) and indeed illuminates much of Greenwell's nonfiction. Reflecting on what Ferrier's recordings had sparked, G recalls: "it didn't just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber". Small Rain's elaboration of this trope might strike some readers as heavy-handed: a strand of the secondary narrative that runs throughout, G and L's love story, features their house, which (much like many relationships) requires more work than either anticipates and which, like G's body, is ravaged by a fateful intrusion. (A storm sends a branch through a wall.) But it is hard not to admire Greenwell's commitment to his project: here is a writer for whom every episode or name (the nurse Alivia's provokes the riff "alleviate, allegory, alive") offers an occasion to elaborate at scale on what each of the readings of music or poetry models, "tuning us to a different frequency of existence".
Here, then, is Greenwell's version of a spiritual credo, and an antidote to the apparently paradoxical celebrations of America's twin gods of consumerism and narcissistic evangelical Christianity by G's extended family that crop up throughout the narrative. Both gods are reflected in the crisis of attention G identifies. We have, he writes, "outsourced consciousness, turned inwardness inside out", endlessly repeating other people's memes, mirroring conspicuous consumption or mimicking partisan political messaging or the cliched platitudes of religion.
The ethos of Small Rain, by contrast, is to set one's head against the weather--to refuse the expedient and efficient, to insist that the only self worth celebrating is one undone and remade, not pandered to in its narrow appetites. This is what Mahler's Lieder revealed to the younger G: they unsettled his expectations of harmony, extending the experience of "dissonance" in service of "an alternative harmony": "it unmade me, unmade and remade me around itself somehow". To the degree that Small Rain is another instalment in an unmaking and remaking of Garth Greenwell's writerly self, it offers a welcome call to action--to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew.
Andrew van der Vlies is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Interim Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Van Der Vlies, Andrew. "Blow, wind, blow! Garth Greenwell's antidote to our crisis of attention." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6337, 13 Sept. 2024, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808520713/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c567bb42. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.