Small Rain
By Garth Greenwell
Macmillan Publishers, 320 pages, $28
Garth Greenwell is the emerging writer I have been most excited about in the past decade, mostly for his powerful intellect and smiting prose skills. His work is more closely observed, better detailed, and more elegantly constructed than almost anyone’s, and his talent for a kind of restrained, luminous faithfulness to what he calls “the concrete, particular thing” is impressive. He has written two good novels to date, Cleanness (2020) and What Belongs to You (2016), and with his third, Small Rain, he seems finally to have found a subject large enough for him.
The book concerns a poet who has a sudden, life-threatening catastrophe—an aortic dissection—in the late summer of 2020, and is hospitalized for a long period of time. These events closely mirror those in Greenwell’s real life, but it is his strength to be both an autobiographical writer and a strangely self-neutral one. His previous writing from the perspective of a gay narrator with submissive sadomasochist desires has been unflinching, refusing to sanitize S&M. He has portrayed sexual experiences in graphic physical and emotional detail, while withholding authorial judgment. Facing death spurs him to question his own value, but even more so to raise the greater question of the value of our human lives.
The book is compulsively gripping, beginning mid-scene during a conversation between the narrator and his triage team at the time of his admission to the hospital, and continuing in five stream-of-consciousness sections that each seem to pass in a single deep breath. Greenwell’s skill at recording the immediate physical details—every ominous test, every friendly orderly or sullen nurse, every dispiriting plastic-nubbed sock—makes the ordeal as tense as if it were happening to a friend or loved one or to the reader herself.
“He asked me to raise my left arm, the one with the bracelet,” he writes of an orderly attending him, and continues, “and he leaned over me to scan it with a barcode reader, a plastic device like you’d see in a supermarket, connected by a coiled cord to the computer station mounted to the wall behind the bed. Then he scanned a barcode on a machine attached higher on the wall….” The details are almost impossibly precise. A few pages later, three technicians attempt to find the aortic dissection on an ultrasound. The narrator observes as they speak about him and his body as if he weren’t there: “Here, he said, you can see it here, and the younger doctor said, Is this it here, this flapping thing, and the older man grunted assent. Grab that for me, he said, and the woman quickly made a couple of strokes on the keyboard, taking a screenshot.” It’s so vivid and easily constructed that the choices behind it—to include all three people, to eschew traditional quotation marks for dialogue, to include this scan at all—seem to disappear, but they are relevant. Close observation of the particular daily details becomes a moral statement and a kind of love.
The book also represents a development in Greenwell’s prose style, or possibly an amplification of its previous tendencies. Always a fluid writer, he now moves seamlessly within and between scenes, from the harrowing goings on at the hospital to the narrator’s backstory, thoughts, memories, and ideas. The action unspools in magnificent paragraph-long sentences that are simultaneously tightly and loosely lashed, full of commas and sequential semicolons. A single one might pose a series of questions, relate a memory of a conversation with a group of students about a work of art, make a declaration, provide analysis of the artwork, and all the while be littered with scene-markers, repetitions, and interjections.
Paragraphs run for pages, and several of the sections include discussions of touchstone artworks—the 16th-century folk song “Westron Wynde,” and a Mass based on it; the poem “The Stranger’s Child” by George Oppen. The latter discussion runs for 14 pages, seamlessly woven into the action, and appears again during a climactically terrible MRI—during which the narrator agonizingly has to pee and forgets all the poetry he’s ever known except for one line. Such is human life, if you’re a clear-eyed observer of it.
Small Rain’s themes emerge quietly from the seething medical crisis. One is art and how it works, which has implications for how the book works, as well. During a discussion of the phrase smalle rayne from the poem the Westron Wynde, the source of the book’s title, the narrator explains that he loves the way its “cracked syntax … becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation.” Rain can’t really be “small,” so the gap between the two words becomes thought-provoking. “Isn’t the nonsense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our attention into it,” the narrator asks. In a similar way, the book offers the narrator’s experience up for contemplation, not offering conclusions, but instead allowing them to arise and coalesce. And we might look for the off-kilter bits, the things that don’t quite match up—the narrator’s experience of being hospitalized during Covid versus the experience of the pandemic itself, for example—as sources of fruitful comparison. Small Rain, in some ways, is a pandemic novel—the first great one, and a very subtle one.
“The narrator is suddenly dependent on the medical system.”
The narrator is suddenly dependent on the medical system, as we all were during the pandemic, at least in theory. His rights and independence, his life and future—all are suddenly in question. His life also depends on the actions and carefulness of strangers. But while pandemic-era debate tended towards shrill certainties on what saving a life was worth, and who should sacrifice what for whom, Greenwell pans out and asks the larger question of how we value those lives in the first place, with conclusions that have elegant implications for pandemic management as well.
The narrator raises and dismisses a value determined by organized religion early on in his ordeal. He isn’t a believer even when faced with death. He confides that in younger years, he tried to make art into a kind of personal god for himself, but couldn’t do that, either. The completeness of his atheism is one of the book’s triumphs, and the Oppen poem, plus another one quoted that’s a favorite of the narrator’s partner, present the hard facts of human nonexistence in the face of eternity. He also dismisses his own personal value casually and almost out of hand (“sometimes it had seemed a full life, and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once”), though he acknowledges his life’s preciousness to him. What he suggests, mostly through juxtaposition and presence, though it also comes up in discussion of the Oppen poem, is that we have value through our relationship to others, a value created and generated by love.
It is such a common observance that it’s hard to see the truth of it, but the breadth of Greenwell’s vision and his unusual ability to allow things to be themselves make it startling in the details. At the center is the obvious: his relationship with his partner, a loving one, but portrayed with honesty, too. The relationship is presented humbly, not as great love, but a small one, the size of two men. But there are also all the closely observed and seemingly unnecessary people the narrator will never see again but whom he has paused to dwell upon: the doctors, nurses, and orderlies, the people who have cared for him well or badly or have just joked around as they wheeled in a machine. The author’s attention to them becomes in the end a moral statement: Every one of them matters. We can’t live in that awareness all the time, the narrator says at one point, but it is our human truth, all the same.
And then there is the wider world, the community. Here, the setting of the pandemic is developed further. The narrator’s opinions on Covid, expressed throughout, are almost perfectly typical of his demographic and milieu. He is horrified when his partner tries to buy masks early on, potentially taking the scarce item away from first-responders. He “confesses” that sometimes when walking outside alone he slightly lifts the mask away from his nose and mouth when he becomes winded and needs to breathe—a humble-brag, from some points of view. He is horrified that the students will be returning to school and believes that “everyone” else is, too. Early on, he becomes estranged from a Trump-loving sister who isn’t taking precautions seriously enough, and so on.
Yet, in the strange out-of-time space of the hospital, this member of a tribe is subsumed into a larger system. A serious conflict involves an incompetent nurse—she may have endangered his life; he also views her as a member of an enemy group. When the narrator complains about her and is confronted by stonewalling authorities, his anger and righteousness somehow slip away, which feels both like the wrong thing (he could have died) and like a desirable resolution. Also, the slight gap between the narrator and his home—he has been forced to leave it—is another of the book’s spaces for contemplation. Several set-piece memories involving his house are woven into the text, and one involves a Trump-voting siding-installation guy with whom the narrator has a conflict. The narrator explains that he did business with the guy in the first place—despite his friends’ opinion that “you don’t have to do business with fascists”—because “I hated that whole way of thinking…. I still believed in civility, in neighborliness, I still wanted to shake hands and say hello and talk about the weather, which seems more important to me sometimes than we think….” That conflict also slips away, not resolved, but diffused. In a book about healing, this also feels right.
In the time of Covid it is a quiet epiphany to see a member of Greenwell’s tribe—or any tribe, really—put the whole human community first. But the book’s philosophical and relational conclusions on love and our value to each other demand it. And Greenwell’s observational powers and self-restraint as an artist do, too: We are a human community; he can’t not see it. It’s no spoiler to say that the narrator survives, goes home, and re-enters his changed but ordinary life. It’s a happy conclusion for him, but was almost a sadness for me as a reader; I could watch Greenwell watch the world forever.