BookBrowse Reviews Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

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When a poet ends up in the ICU after a medical emergency, his world both contracts into the daily rituals of hospital life and expands into wider meditations on life, death, love, and art.

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.

This review first ran in the September 4, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.