Publishers Weekly
★ 07/15/2024
A gay poet struggles with a mysterious and agonizing pain in Greenwell’s intense latest (after Cleanness). Wracked with debilitating agony that stretches through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator is urged by his partner, L, to see a doctor. After waiting for hours in the emergency room, he endures a battery of examinations and tests. Eventually, he receives a shocking diagnosis of life-threatening aortic tearing. Weeks of hospitalization and grueling procedures follow, and over the course of his slow recovery, the narrator juxtaposes raw depictions of his vulnerability and helplessness with excoriating critiques of the healthcare industry’s inequities and inefficiencies and the alienation he feels among the “relentlessly heterosexual” staff. The narrator also reflects on his dysfunctional family history; meeting L as a creative writing student in Iowa City, where he’s remained after graduating seven years earlier; and the negotiations he and L have gone through to find happiness and fulfillment in their shared living space. The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator’s bracing account of his grueling ordeal (“The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale”), serving as a palpable reminder to never take one’s health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“I just didn’t put it down . . . Very romantic, incredibly moving.”
—Miranda July, author of All Fours
“A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy.”
—Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
“An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love . . . An utter triumph of expression.”
—The Bookseller
“Small Rain is a marvel, one of America’s greatest writers working at the top of his game, moving into new territory with force and grace and wisdom and overwhelming beauty.”
—Phil Klay, author of Missionaries
“Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“Greenwell writes with exquisite precision about pain and loss—but his novel is equally a meditation on joy, beauty, and above all, love. Small Rain is a triumph, one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time.”
—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
“Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell’s sensibility is rich and generous—the narrator's memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician