Garth Greenwell's generous, expansive new novel, "Small Rain" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is built on the author's own experience of a dozen-day stay in the hospital, gazing into the maw of death from an infrarenal aortic dissection; affairs of the heart. The author's fans, now legion, will hold their breath in suspense even though the very existence of the book attests to his survival.
A celebrated record producer once commented that, for a singer, "the sine qua non of a great career is an immediately recognizable vocal timbre." An identifying, defining sound, in short, and for all the ways "Small Rain" represents exploration of new terrain, for author and reader alike, that extension only augments the unique voice Greenwell staked out in his two previous novels.
What likely will seem absent, until the very end, is any depiction of sex, at least of the kind of sensational sex writing that brought him first fame. Then, in the short section about his —you can only call it discharge— home from the hospital to the arms of his life companion, Luis, comes an almost sacramental aside.
"It had been some time since we'd had sex, some time before I went into the hospital, I mean. What happened to most couples had happened to us, sex had become an event, something remarkable ... the whole time in the hospital it was like that part of me had died, I thought maybe I would never do it again... maybe that whole part of me was a thing of the past.
"It wasn't really sex, what we did, I was too exhausted, too weak," but several pages of explicit, tender prose, lacking nothing in hushed intensity, recount the physical intimacy that did resurface back home. "That was what we had built together, I thought, the real unprecedented thing, a happiness that was equally ours, his and mine... "
Garth Greeenwell has written a true-life love story. If not a romance novel in the usual sense, it's a novel as true romance.
But is it a novel?
My first exposure to that kind of writing was Norman Mailer's stupendous, self-described "true life novel," "The Executioner's Song," and then Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." But they were different, eschewing a narrating "I."
It has always been clear that the stories Greenwell told in his previous books were drawn from his own life experience. "Small Rain" begins with what is already the novel's most famous sentence, emblazoned in large type on the cover of the advanced reading copy —above title and author: "They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale."
I admit my heart sank a few months ago, when I first heard Greenwell read from what was then his novel in progress, fearing an authorial lapse into the chillingly named "autofiction."
But "Small Rain" asserts itself, its own validity, and then I remembered that contemporary writers as different —yet similar— as Annie Lamott and flavor-of-the-month French fiction writer Annie Ernaux have proclaimed in their individual ways that your story is your story. No one can take it away from you, and translating it into prose is a matter of courage, not expedience.
And then I remembered the words of a mentor of mine, that whatever you're writing or think you are, "The minute you put pen to paper, it's fiction."
While wrestling, futilely, with these hydra-headed concepts, the old me that resisted letting go of the "old Greenwell" rehearsed of one of my pet peeves in biography, namely, the authorial insertion of details of the subject's perceptions and feelings when no such embroiderment is plausible, let alone part of the historical record.
The lavish detail of Greenwell's writing in this 300-page novel may or may not be "true," but it's entirely credible —asserts its own truth— and is at the heart of the author's achievement here. For all their gritty detail, these pages are not the world's greatest nurses' notes but rather the reflections of a quicksilver observing mind and soul.
Greenwell staked out comparable ground with the middle section of "What Belongs to You," a 40-page single paragraph that darts in and out of past and even future to establish its own kind of time. Any impulse to question the author's even greater elaboration of thoughts, memories, and projections in "Small Rain" is stilled by the way past, present, and future are limned in long, loping sentences, leaping commas with a single bound, climbing and descending the mountainous paragraphs.
But he does not digress
Reading "Small Rain," I was frequently reminded of Nietzsche's insistence that the path to truth is through "circuitous routes." Greenwell's plot — and there is one, decisively— weaves four main threads. Central is one recounting the horrors, depredations, and monotony with regrettable interruptions that make up hospitalized life, and the surprising appearances of angels in the form of caring nurses and doctors.
Then there's the renovation of the couple's house followed by its devastation in a horrid, Midwestern wind-whipped derecho. And then there's Greenwell's own pilgrim's progress through lifelong body dysphoria.
"What a strange thing a body is," he writes, "how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail; and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable... it had been all that time available for love and it had never occurred to me to love it."
Preeminently, and throughout, there is the story of his love of Luis, himself a poet and teacher. At first, Greenwell writes, they seemed to be "struggling in our lack of a common language though it didn't feel like struggling, it felt like play." As for play, there's a short coda set in a dog park, with its multifaceted manifestations of joy.
And then there are the poems, jutting out of the narrative only to refract meaning back onto it. Perhaps the earliest indication that this is the Greenwell of yore is the seeming diversion from the main story to the author's memory of a particular Middle English poem (where it is "smalle rayne" but a big epiphany) that gives the novel its title.
But by the time the novel has run its course, there are what can only be called disquisitions on a number of other poems —analyses, to be sure, but, more to his point, reflections in the broadest sense of the word.
The most extensive is a deep dive into George Oppen's "Stranger's Child." His short stanzas give Greenwell an opportunity to propound what matters most to him, as a poet and writer, that is, to dwell on "what I care about most, devotion to the actual." The initial impetus for the extended examination of Oppen's poem is Greenwell's observation of a sparrow sitting on the ledge of the high window in his ICU room.
While in the PET scanner, agonizingly wanting to pee despite being told not to move a muscle, he muses, "Suddenly I realized I had been repeating something, not a poem, not even a line, but two words [from Oppen's poem] I made into a kind of chant: naked rock, naked rock, naked rock, naked rock, naked rock."
By the time he chants them, those two tiny words are immensely moving.
The writing sparkles
Looking at the Oppen poem, Greenwell pauses over the comparative oddity of the poet's use of the surprisingly uncharacteristic word "sparkle." There could hardly be a better one to describe the author's own writing. Everywhere there is verbal astonishment, yet invention almost miraculously free of exhibitionism or grandstanding.
He thinks the doctors consider him "an infinitely cherishable bundle of pathos." A departing nurse collects the remnants of yet another bedside medical procedure, disposing of "the deflated [IV] bags, husks with little puddles in the bottom."
The concurrence of the actual and the philosophical is rare but precious.
"It was the loveliest feeling, to buy books and feel like it was an act of virtue, books I would almost certainly never read ... but that gave me pleasure just sitting in their piles. They gave a sense of abundance."
Does it need saying? Buy this book, then savor its abundance.
Garth Greenwell reads from and signs copies of "Small Rain at Green Apple Books, 1231 9th Ave., September 11, 7pm. www.greenapplebooks.com
'Small Rain' by Garth Greenwell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 302 pages, also audiobook read by the author, $28. www.fsbooks.com
www.garthgreenwell.com
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