The Brooklyn Rail

The unnamed narrator in Small Rain, a poet and teacher in Iowa City, checks into the hospital in excruciating pain and is diagnosed with an infrarenal aortic dissection, a tear of the inner layer of his aorta. As he recovers in a haze of medication and fasting, his mind wanders through the fever dream that is this gripping third novel by master stylist Garth Greenwell.

Physical pain is the lingua franca of this story, “a medium of existence,” and “a brute crushing fact, a hammer pounding meat.” The hospital is isolating, not only for its echoes of the first waves of the pandemic—nurse burnout among them—but also because protocols limit when L, the narrator’s beloved, can visit. If the narrator fears death, he is also aggrieved that both his literary production and L’s kisses will be cut short.

One week turns into two and the narrator loses track of the days, with only an IV drip to mark the time. In this altered reality, he makes new discoveries, ones that poetry has already made familiar to him. “Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live…. there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.” There’s poetry in the way Greenwell describes the crinkle of medical packaging, the swirling rhythms of hospital staff. He narrates scenes where time is both a pinhead and an unfathomable expanse, in a style no less probing and sumptuous than that of Hotel de Dream by Edmund White, a novel in which writer Stephen Crane dictates, from his deathbed, a story about Manhattan’s late nineteenth-century gay underworld.

The narrator of Small Rain works out entire treatises on art, such as when a nurse palpates him, and he suddenly hears a Mahler composition. “The song articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that, too, it created something; it didn’t just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn’t have felt before.” Music grounds the narrator in the face of the mindless feed scroll and “American irrationality … when the most basic facts had been called into question, when calling them into question had become for much of my country a kind of declaration of allegiance, an identity.”

What does any of this matter when you have a seventy-five percent chance of dying? The narrator laments knowing more about iambic pentameter than about the machines keeping him alive. When he recounts to a nurse his literary tours of the world, she thinks only about the viruses and bacteria he may have been exposed to. Here illness cannot afford to be metaphor; the narrator instead gives us all its uncanny, unsightly embodiments. But he acknowledges the duality “of wanting to be faithful to the concrete, particular thing” while also wanting to make it representative—the tension behind all great art.

The house that the narrator shares with L is an inescapable parallel to what’s going on at the hospital. A renovation turns into a nightmare and a falling branch pierces the roof during a terrifying derecho. “Something had happened to us both, to me and to the house, the same misfortune.” Even as the narrator wonders if the house—and therefore domesticity—is a prison, he knows that “the key to a long life with another, the key that kept it from being a prison, wasn’t devotion, which I had a talent for, but forgiveness.” He can’t wait to return to his writing desk and to the smell of L’s cooking, which is also a return to love.

Fans of Greenwell’s previous novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness can once again revel in the author’s proclivity for writing into pleasure, this time through the stickiness of adhesive tape, where injections, sponge baths, and massages are equally intimate and humiliating. “She was the first person here who had touched me in a way that had no medical purpose, no measurable end but comfort,” he says of a nurse. The lightest touch on the back of his knee harkens back to a stranger’s touch in a bar. Drinking a first coffee after a week of deprivation electrifies his senses, a scene that alone makes the book worth reading.

Small Rain is a masterpiece of a novel, a single breath of life that contains the world in all its beautiful and horrifying minutiae. Greenwell narrates the personal in an absorbing style where fear is supplanted by discovery, cynicism by a desire to be loved. It is a linguistic and corporeal unmaking as American as unaffordable healthcare or witnessing a catastrophe and wondering if it will one day happen to you. With tension that seems effortless but that costs his body everything, the narrator rises from the gurney to tell a simple story in uncommon terms, one that asks us not to look away, but rather, to slow down and take closer notice of what matters.