Alwynne's Reviews > Small Rain

Although Greenwell’s exceptionally-accomplished novel has autobiographical underpinnings, he’s adamant it be regarded as fiction, not autofiction – a genre he views as suspect perhaps because, for him, it blurs the boundaries between personal experience and the transfiguration of experience through art. Greenwell’s story's narrated by an unnamed man in the throes of a medical emergency, heralded by sudden, previously-unimaginable pain. But this emergency’s unfolding in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and the narrator’s more concerned with avoiding overflowing hospitals than seeking treatment. But when it’s clear this pain’s not going away, he’s forced to act. After hours in a dingy, crowded emergency room, it transpires the narrator’s aorta’s so damaged it’s a miracle he’s still alive, let alone still standing. But the explanation for his condition eludes him and his doctors. He’s an enigma that gives him near-celebrity status for the team of professionals rushing to his bedside.

And so, the narrator’s transplanted from the world of the living into a liminal space, the otherworldly territory of the sick. The pandemic means hospital visitors are restricted, so human contact’s primarily with medical staff: the outside’s only glimpsed through windows, so that a sighting of a sparrow perched on a nearby ledge becomes something marvellous. Isolation stirs a series of reflections: some based in memory, others in thoughts about a self the narrator can no longer take for granted. Outside, he’s a poet slowly building a reputation in literary circles, a southerner now living in Iowa City. A choice founded in his relationship with fellow poet L. who teaches there – L.’s character mirrors aspects of Greenwell’s own partner, poet Luis Muñoz. The bond between narrator and L., albeit shifting from earlier passion to comfortable domesticity, highlights the strangeness of being assigned a new identity as patient rather than person; subjected to intimate acts ‘stripped of intimacy,’ scrutinised, handled and assessed by a succession of strangers. Strangers in turn evaluated by the narrator: those who might provisionally act as friends; those who appear caring; those who seem closer to callous. All underlining the narrator’s incredible vulnerability: reduced to a mass of arteries, organs, and limbs that operate as junctions between his body and the machinery he now needs to function.

The narrator’s time’s punctuated by hospital routines and procedures with brief intervals created by L.’s daily visits. As time passes, the narrator retreats into meditations on the art and literature important to him. Small incidents set off fertile chains of association, as his doctors mentally dissect and parse his body, the narrator parses and dissects his favourite poems – the incomprehensible language of medicine countered by the known of literature. Two separate realms which first clash then slowly intersect - unlike the ongoing clashes between hospitals battling Covid and swathes of American society refusing to admit to its existence. A situation that angers and baffles the narrator whose analysis of his situation mingles with concerns about his society, a culture of distinctly ‘American unreason.’ The sense of being undone by his body parallels impressions of America as a ‘coming-apart country’ rife with conflict and falsities: racist policing; climate denial in the face of ongoing ecological devastation. So that Greenwell’s remarkably-convincing portrait of a body in crisis broadens into a compelling examination of contemporary America’s ills.

Although the narrator here clearly connects to the ones featured in Greenwell’s earlier novels, this works perfectly as a standalone piece. Greenwell’s influences are wide-ranging drawing on the so-called literature of illness including Virginia Woolf’s discussions of living with pain. For me there were echoes too of Mark Doty, Anne Boyer’s writings on cancer and capitalism, and Denton Welch grappling with hospitalisation after a catastrophic accident. Greenwell’s prose is disciplined, measured yet strangely hypnotic – as is his meticulously detailed account of his narrator’s medical treatments. But this is also a book about what might console and sustain in the face of overwhelming precarity: tenderness, the recognition, acceptance, and celebration of love. Greenwell’s dubbed it as above all a message to his partner Luis. Yet Greenwell’s narrative steers admirably clear of sentimentality, it’s fluid, gripping, relatable and, in its early stages, sometimes close to unbearably tense.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC

Rating: 4/4.5 rounded up