Review: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

From his very first book, Garth Greenwell has played with the binaries of life and fiction. His characters are generally placed in geographical and professional positions that the author himself has experienced. And yet, the story is not autobiographical. His books have explored sex, writing, teaching, and dislocation in ways that are rare in contemporary writing. In his latest novel, Small Rain, the author enters visceral new territories, managing to blur the boundaries between fiction and autobiography.

In Iowa city, as the second wave of the pandemic has begun shutting down the world, an excruciating pain in the gut turns a poet’s life inside out. L, his partner asks him to call the doctor but the poet insists the pain is temporary. Then, the pain erupts again and he has to check into the hospital all by himself. His partner bombards him with text messages but the poet is entering a whole new world as he learns of his medical condition. As he begins settling into hospital life, recollections from the past enter his consciousness. Poetry, music, childhood, trysts with men, and Iowa’s storms envelop him in a world that haunts him as much as the thing that is disrupting his body. Connected to IV tubes and ‘carpet-bombed’ by antibiotics, he longs for L and their home.

Greenwell’s writing was abrasive in his earlier novels. In Cleanness (2020), there was a cutting-edge finish that gave the American teacher in Bulgaria the strength to mask his vulnerability and deal with the world. The narrator writes: “I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.” In Small Rain, the reader encounters the same teacher confronting risk and being vulnerable. Here he is with his lover: “…he said What, and when I said nothing he said what again, tell me, and I told him that I was so happy to see him, that I loved him with my whole heart.” The difference is stark and fitting and shows Greenwell’s skill as a writer who can communicate his characters’ temperaments with just the tone of his words.

While ailments and medical conditions persist in all of Greenwell’s work, the reader experiences the hospital and medicine in this novel with greater intensity. Like French writer Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart (2013), this is medical fiction that eviscerates both the protagonist and the reader. In both these works, dramatic shifts do not happen in speedy succession. Greenwell’s poet wonders, “What a strange thing a body is, I thought, how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail…” The medical mystery keeps the reader hooked amidst these introspective ruminations.

The novel examines the mind in a hospital. Pain is the first thing that brought the poet there. But for the mind, the stay in the hospital is less about peace or pain but more an exercise in waiting, in an act of revolting patience. Philip Larkin remarked that hospitals are, “…harder to return from; who knows/ Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait”. Waiting in a hospital is what upsets characters in Greenwell’s novel, in Kerangal’s book, and in real life too. This waiting is the world at its face-off with the pandemic. Additionally, the couple in the novel has waited years to have a home of their own. Subtly, ‘the small raine’ that the author writes about is an act of longing where patience and waiting are demanded of the poet whose yearning echoes these lines from Westron Wynde, the 16th century song that inspired the book’s title: ‘Cryst, if my love were in my armes/And I in my bedde again’.

With paragraphs that continue for pages and sentences that run with a series of actions, this is perhaps the most challenging of Greenwell’s novels. Given the medical disembowelment of the poet’s body, it can also be emotionally difficult to read it in one sitting. But these qualities are also what makes Small Rain stand out. Proustian in its scope, and painful in a Woolfesque way, it is a tour-de-force. There are moments when the reader has to pause as they feel trapped in the poet’s body, his helplessness. At such moments, admiration for the book and its author grows manifold. He writes about the body, writing, books and poetry not to change the reader but to make them think.

Small Rain is an achievement in contemporary queer fiction. It gives a sense of the life that gay men manage to build together. Unlike the author’s other books, or books about gay men where characters are lost, single, and find solace in sleeping with men they meet on the go, this is a novel about a long love, an old love. The poet’s longing for domesticity with his partner, to share his body with him, in the home they have put together is what makes this a masterpiece. This is Greenwell’s best work.

Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He is @fook_bood on Instagram and @rahulzsing on X