The Strange Case of Garth Greenwell

by Ben Shields

Small Rain: A Novel

by Garth Greenwell

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 299 pp., $28.00

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Garth Greenwell’s first book, What Belongs to You, succeeded even if his weaknesses were in plain sight. His sense of language so effectively captured abjection and sexual obsession that you didn’t mind whatever else was wrong with it. Greenwell seldom changes register, and he can no more imagine his way into another person's life than the author of your car manual. Yet he’s a born writer, a master at transposing his consciousness onto the page. I understood people’s initial reservations about him: too ornate, a knack for perfectly unsexy sex scenes, a nonexistent sense of humor. But I understood even better the across-the-board raves the book received. Here was something from another time, a Serious Novel you’d actually want to read, a swelling narrative voice whose subject was the nature of passion. I wish What Belongs to You were coming out now. A soaring exercise in style transcending corporate literary accolade magnets, distinct from the nauseating, irony-saturated gameplaying of downtown New York — has there been anything like it since?

His second novel, Cleanness, was respectfully received by reviewers, if more reservedly than the triumphant debut. Actually, depending on whom you ask, it might not be a novel—it might be a story collection, or if you consult Greenwell himself, it might be a “lieder cycle.” While all this gaseous talk of form suggests everything irritating about Greenwell, Cleanness was structurally spry—clean indeed. The chapters stood alone, yet drew life from each other, rescuing the careful prose from feeling overdetermined. But for all that structural sophistication, too many fundamentals went out the window. Both Greenwell’s first two books chronicle relationships with other men. Mitko, the Bulgarian hustler muse of the debut, was the perfect vacuum for the greedy Greenwell treatment. Merely by reading it, you feel like you're the author, methodically, ruthlessly actualizing a sexual fantasy. What Belongs To You worked because it seduced us—never mind that it wasn't actually very sexy. "R," the boyfriend in Cleanness, was on the other hand as captivating as his dreary moniker suggests, an anemic presence strangled by prehensile prose. Beginning in Cleanness, now, too, in his latest, Small Rain, Greenwell’s characters do not get names, just a soggy letter in the alphabet soup of self-consciousness. Quotation marks are dispensed with, soldiering the words of others into conformity with the narration's catatonic drone. Conventional dialogue, like names, risks giving those outside the author's head too long a leash. Since Cleanness, Greenwell runs his imagination like an internment camp, one where the warden's pensive inner monologue must never be disturbed.

Small Rain, the follow-up to Cleanness, isn’t merely bad: