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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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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.
1
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 I write, where I spend most of my time, reading or writing, though really I hadn't lain, I had crouched on all fours, I had curled into myself, clutching my stomach, I had held my balls as if to shield them in my hand. It didn't occur to me to go to the hospital, in part because for months I had thought of hospitals and doctors, of medical offices of all kinds, as the last places one would go for help, as dangerous places, in the pandemic the likeliest places to get infected, everyone I knew felt the same. Only if you were dying would you go to the hospital and it didn't occur to me that I could be dying. I wonder if anyone ever imagines they're dying, even as it happens, or if anyone imagines it without being sick for a long time, people like me, I mean, who have always been more or less healthy and more or less strong, hale, as my grandparents said, as my mother sometimes says, or said until now, counting her blessings, all of her children hearty and hale. I didn't imagine anything as I lay there, as I crouched or curled, nothing occurred to me, when I try to remember my thoughts they come broken and scrambled. I be- came a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul. I spoke only once, when L came down from his office upstairs—we both work during the day, we're used to hours of silence, our life together depends on measuring out solitude and company—and tapped on my door and receiving no reply opened it slowly, gingerly, until he saw me where I lay and spoke in alarm. What happened, he said, what's wrong, he was speaking Spanish though it was an English day, we alternate days, each of us likes living in the other's language. I must have grunted or moaned, made some sound, because he said But tell me, please, what is it, and I told him I was sick, it was the most I could manage, I said I was sick through gritted teeth, taking shallow breaths; if I breathed too deeply the pain was worse, the fist in my gut twisted at the wrist. Vamos al médico, L said, his tone resolute, stern, he knelt by the sofa and put his hand on my back, right now, vamos. When I shook my head no he began to argue, an argument we've had often, anytime I feel even slightly unwell he insists we go to the doctor; in his country the health system works as it should, he has a European sense of what it means to be ill. Always, nearly always, I refused, even before the pandemic; I've always hated doctors, a sense I got as a child, I suppose, that things usually pass, that doctors waste your money and your time, you wait for hours and they send you home the same or sicker. An American attitude or a Kentucky attitude maybe, most of my siblings share it. But I couldn't argue with him now, I said Please, guapo, I can't, and when he started to speak again I said please, I love you, I can't talk, I need to be alone. I knew it would hurt him but it was true, I couldn't be considerate, pain had sealed me off from sociability. Okay, he said, standing ...
Excerpted from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his early forties, is stricken with acute abdominal pain. The COVID pandemic is raging and he's reluctant to visit the hospital, but after suffering at home for a few days, he finally capitulates to his alarmed partner and ends up in the ER, where doctors discover that he has a life-threatening aortic tear.
The rest of 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.
"I sat in a chair while she took my blood pressure and temperature….I disliked her, I realized, I felt an antipathy she hadn't earned. Probably she was exhausted; I can't imagine it, day after day seeing people in pain, at their worst moments, over years; how could you protect yourself from that, I wondered, there was some human regard I wanted from her that I had no right to demand."
The protagonist in Small Rain bears a close resemblance to Greenwell himself: a writer raised in Kentucky and living in Iowa City with his partner. Greenwell's previous novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, shared a similar first-person voice, but the landscapes of the novels are very different. Both earlier novels are set in Sofia, Bulgaria and explore queer sexuality and desire. In Small Rain, the subject of illness and its attendant concerns appear alongside the protagonist's quiet, domestic life in Iowa.
The poet also meditates on art and beauty; in one particularly significant section, he reflects on his attempt to introduce his literature students to a favorite poem by American poet George Oppen (see Beyond the Book), about a sparrow: "I wanted to tell them, this record of a mind's noticing, a moment of particularizing attention. From a flock of sparrows this sparrow, in a forest." The sparrow of Oppen's poem is both individual and representative of other sparrows—perhaps all sparrows—throughout time. This is a key to the novel's larger ideas about art: the poet thinks about the core challenges of creating art, wanting to be "faithful to the concrete, particular thing," but "wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative."
It's also a key to the novel's own form, which continually adjusts its narrative lens from the close-up and personal to the wide-angled and universal. 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. The novel's title, too, reminds us how connected this one man and his experience is to all of humankind. "Small rain" is taken from the medieval poem "Westyrn Winds":
Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The lament of this poem reminds us that people throughout history, like Greenwell's narrator, have turned to poetry to help articulate the depth of their desire and pain, and that the yearning for home and family is universal.
As the poet in the novel processes his time in the hospital—the vague and inconclusive tests; the cheerful but evasive jargon of doctors and nurses; the days that blur into one another; the sharp and constant fear—his appetites for the world are sharpened. He eats a potato chip, and it is like eating one for the first time. He drinks a coffee, and coffee has never tasted better. As he realizes how close he has come to death, his life becomes very sweet. In his newly weakened state, he holds the world close. This is Greenwell's gift: to ask the reader how one can live a life with true appreciation, paying close attention to the full gamut of sorrow and joy in the world.
Reviewed by Danielle McClellan
Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
Miranda July, author of All Fours
Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
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 remarried, but he had a difficult relationship with his stepmother, and his childhood spent in New York and San Francisco was not a happy one. After tumultuous teenage years, Oppen met his wife, Mary Colby, at college in Oregon. The two eventually began a long road trip across the country, where they worked any jobs that they could find, and Oppen wrote poetry.
When George and Mary reached New York, he became involved with a group of poets creating a new movement they called Objectivism. The idea was to emphasize "simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme." Oppen came into a small inheritance when he turned twenty-one, and together with the poet Louis Zukofsky, he started a short-lived poetry magazine that published work by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, among others. Later, he would be a cofounder of the Objectivist Press, which would publish numerous books of poetry, including Oppen's own first book, Discrete Series, with a preface by Ezra Pound.
During the Great Depression, the Oppens became increasingly interested in progressive politics and activism. George would stop writing poetry entirely, finding it inadequate to address the demands of the times; in his essay "The Mind's Own Place," he argues that poetry is not a form of political action. "There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning," he wrote. He began working for the American Communist Party in various roles, including serving as an election campaign manager in 1936. However, by 1942, the Oppens were disillusioned with the Party, and George quit his job to join the military, believing that the World War II fight against fascism was paramount. After being badly wounded in battle, he was awarded a Purple Heart.
Soon after returning to New York after the war, George and Mary were targeted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. They fled to Mexico, where they lived for most of the next decade. When they returned to New York in the late 1950s, Oppen began writing poetry again. He published several more books of poetry, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for Of Being Numerous, his most critically acclaimed collection; the title poem is "widely considered his masterpiece" and "examines questions of singularity within a diverse and crowded world."
Oppen's poetry is spare and precise, with "terse, powerful lines and strong, focused syntax." Like other Objectivist poets, he "emphasized the poem as an object in itself, not as a vehicle of meaning or association." The poet James Longenbach wrote that "Oppen's respect for the art of making, no matter how small, is at every moment palpable, and it infuses his work with sweetness that makes difficulty feel like life's reward."
George and Mary moved back to San Francisco in the late 1960s. His final work, Primitive, was completed with Mary's help in 1978, after he became stricken with Alzheimer's disease; Mary also published an autobiography, Meaning a Life, that year.
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