PNWBibliophile's Reviews > Small Rain

4.5 stars rounded up. There are moments in life when you know you’re bestowed the unique experience of engaging with something rare and beautiful. You know it is a precious thing that not everyone gets and your gratitude for being alive and stumbling into it’s presence swells within you. It makes you feel alive, like this bleak world, for a moment, has meaning. Some of the best literature gets me there, but honestly it is a rare experience despite trying to read as much as I can. Garth Greenwell’s writing takes me there and I am forever grateful to have stumbled upon him. His prose has a distinctive, intimate eloquence in honing in on human emotion to examine our vulnerability in such a touching and fulfilling way. You may never have experienced the exact situations or emotions his characters go through, but you find that the wall between character and reader evanescences with his writing.

In Small Rain, we follow a middle-aged gay writer who unexpectedly has a life-threatening and life-altering medical crisis, compelling him to navigate his own mortality and vulnerability within a US healthcare system just past the first swell of the COVID pandemic but still in the thick of it.

I was nervous to delve into this because, like many of us, the pandemic gave me PTSD and revisiting it can often strain scars freshly knit. While this did elicit all of the negative emotions I experienced during the pandemic, it felt like the writing acknowledged and validated those feelings in a therapeutic way, which was something I didn’t realize I needed. I didn’t foresee one minor theme being the rising facism and societal collapse we seem hostage to in the US at present. I connected strongly with that, and it made the novel feel prescient, like it had something important to say. This is viewed primarily through the lens of the healthcare system, which was a unique setting and appropriate vehicle. Because the narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian-American and his partner is from a Spanish-speaking country, they give us a rather rare dynamic that is multi-cultural, queer, uncosmopolitan—and refreshingly—not narrated from someone in their teens or twenties.

The claustrophobic, frenetic situation the main character finds himself in—having an aortic dissection and being abruptly healthy one minute and precariously bedridden the next—was portrayed well, punctuated by the narrator’s thoughts back to other moments of helplessness in his life. This felt so real, authentic, and deeply human. This is juxtaposed against the the tender relationship dynamic between the protagonist and his partner and the relationships he builds with those in his care team. In this way, the novel gives you a compelling take on how we can fall into hopelessness while being rescued by the warmth of those who genuinely care. That sense of hope threaded into the story makes examining the emotionally-frought topics at the heart of of the novel palatable, while giving the narrative depth.

I’ll also say hat’s-off to the author for skillfully and delicately capturing the dynamic between a patient and the healthcare workers caring for them. You get to see the narrator at one point sticking up for himself while feeling the guardedness (for legal reasons) of the healthcare team who is dealing with the repercussions of one nurse’s mistake while simultaneously trying to convey to the narrator that they are on his side. The tension of that moment was executed perfectly. He also brilliantly captured how healthcare workers were fighting the extra tax on the system from the virus while putting their own lives at risk while also dealing with the radical right saying they were making it all up. I work in healthcare and find it’s often portrayal in media in an overly-dramatized or poorly-researched manner. Greenwell, however, pulled it off.

One minor critique is that the style got into stream of consciousness, with the main character dissecting poems in his head several times. Though I enjoyed the majority of these, there was one which I had difficulty following as someone who doesn’t have an academic-level knowledge of poetry. It mildly took me out of the writing, but I also find it endearing when authors I like ramble about things they love. I cherish Greenwell’s literary style, and believe those who value prose testing artistic boundaries with structure, device, narrative, and themes will see this novel’s merits. Overall, it was a pleasure to read, with the writing having a depth and tenderness that drew me in. Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.