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A Novel
by Garth Greenwell
Book Reviewed by:A medical crisis brings one man close to death―and to love, art, and beauty―in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value―art, memory, poetry, music, care―are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
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They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale. It was like someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked, trying to turn me inside out and failing and trying again. Like that, while somebody else kneed me in the groin. For eight hours on Saturday, I said—On Saturday, someone interrupted, I was surrounded by people at this point, some busy with IVs or electrodes but most, it seemed, just looking at me, asking me to answer questions I had already answered, wanting to hear everything afresh. In my own words, they said, not the words they had heard from others, the words that had summoned them here, from all corners of the huge hospital I was lucky to have almost in my backyard, just a mile from my house—on Saturday and you waited until today to come in, the voice said, you must be the stoic type. Stoic or stupid, I thought. For eight hours I had lain on the sofa in the room where...
The novel is mostly set in the ICU, where the narrator is tethered to his hospital bed with IV lines and sensors, but where his mind roams freely and widely. Greenwell is a master at creating intimacy; the poet seems to speak directly to the reader, and his narrative voice is compelling: sometimes self-critical and dismissive of his perceptions, but also empathic and reflective... As the poet is experiencing his own unique medical crisis, the outside world faces an unprecedented pandemic; both the individual and the larger world suffer from anxiety about the uncertain future...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
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. Miranda July, author of All Fours
I just didn't put it down...Very romantic, incredibly moving. Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell's sentences crackle with contained energy.
In Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the unnamed protagonist—facing a difficult and uncertain medical diagnosis—finds solace in a poem by the poet George Oppen. The poem is only a few simple lines, but the protagonist marvels at how much unfolds when one sits with Oppen's work and lets it quietly speak. "I loved how, among the abstraction, his images became luminous, shards of the real, non-abstract world, occasions for wonder," he thinks.
Even for poetry lovers, the name George Oppen may be unfamiliar. However, he is a fascinating and significant figure in twentieth century American poetry.
Born in 1908 to an affluent New York family, Oppen lost his mother to suicide when he was only four years old. His father soon ...
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