GARTH GREENWELL – SMALL RAIN ****

Garth Greenwell is a distinguished writer. He’s also, in my opinion, not easy to read.

Such is the detail in this story that either it is autobiographic, or he has had the best medical advice known to man. The details are astounding, every needle or pill or x ray is described in minute detail. It follows, without separate lines or quotation marks for dialogue, the extensive stay in hospital for the gay male protagonist as doctors and nurses discover what is wrong. And that’s it. With a few asides to life outside the four walls of his room. You are there. You might as well be the protagonist yourself.

The amazing thing is that something so potentially boring, a man going through tests for an unknown illness having been rushed to A&E, can be so absorbing. You have to keep reading. You have to find out what’s wrong and why. You need to read it for yourself.

<i>"What a little time it takes to part us from the life we knew."</i>

This will definitely be one of my top reads of the year. It's a book about ILLNESS and DEATH, and mainly takes place in the narrator's head. But I could NOT put it down. I loved all the <i>Magic Mountain</i> vibes of being like, oh my God, I am just a body, I am just a piece of meat. The data of the body collected by the hospital vs the abstract poetry the narrator has spent his life studying/teaching. And yet it is an incredibly uplifing, hopeful, and spiritaul read. A very impressive achievement.

I'm sometimes wary about books that read like they're just a transcription of the author's personal experience. You could VERY, VERY easily read this novel as a collection of Garth Greenwell's thoughts and reflections. Yiyun Li's <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/02/the-particles-of-order-fiction-yiyun-li">recent story in the New Yorker</a>is a good counterpoint of an author using FICTION and FICTIONAL TECHNIQUES to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/yiyun-li-09-02-24">write about a very difficult personal experience</a> rather than, like, memoir-ish techniques (i.e. conflation between narrator and writer).

So for me it was hard not to read this particular novel as a conflation/transcription (i.e. this is a book about what happened to me). But one of the themes in the book is WHAT IS THE POINT OF ART and WHAT CAN ART HELP US WITH, WHAT CAN ART DO. I was SO down with these passages. Oh my God, I was so moved! Yes, I am 100% the main audience for these kinds of reflections but so what!!

I also thought the technique of the book (the run-on sentences) and the shift between memory and present-tense in the hospital was expertly handled. You can really tell that Greenwell's training as a poet has trained him incredibly well in terms of being attentive to the energy of the language on the page. His background as a poet also serves him well in terms of another theme of the book that I loved - the importance of paying a particular kind of attention, to small unremarkable moments. Yes!!! This is achieved most memorably in a close reading of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=97&issue=2&page=21">this poem</a>, which was my favourite part of the whole book (it's worth reading the whole novel, I'd say, for this passage alone). It is SUCH a refreshing antidote to fucking TikTok ADHD consumer culture!!!

I loved the book's focus on the theme of love and happiness. I also loved the scene between him and the house contractor and how this leads to a reflection on the importance of 'loving your neighbour' - <i>"that's more important to me now than the purity of my life, than living with absolute integrity."</i>

I would strongly recommend this book to any fan of literary fiction and anyone who's working in the humanities/arts sector.

Quotes about the value/point of art that I loved:

<i>"The song articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that too, it created something; it didn't just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn't have felt before. It humanised me, I want to say."

"All art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there's a kind of sense only nonsense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible. It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel; it had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once."

"The only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core - though they were necessary to me, I thought, no matter how sick I might be they were still necessary to me."

"It's also why we need poems, I think: they exist in a different relationship to attention and to time; it's impossible for harried students worrying about their exams, for harried readers checking their phones, to see and feel what's happening in them. Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that's the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems... Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence."</i>

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

The haunting and haunted story of a poet's journey through a terrifying illness and his stay in hospital in the midst of the Covid pandemic. The dislocation from time and space. The weird, ongoing and mutable relationship with a body that up to this point has served him well and his isolation from the people who love him is a fragile, damaged fever dream that in quiet sentences and intimate gestures sketches a catastrophe and a recovery.

Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for this ARC.

Rating: 3.5 Stars, rounded up.

This is the second of Greenwell’s books that I have read (the first being What Belongs to You), which I will admit I didn’t love at the time I read it, yet it still had me intrigued enough to add his other work, Cleanness, to my tbr, and immediately request an ARC for this one when I saw it.

Small Rain deals with an unnamed narrator who experiences a medical crisis which leads to him immediately being admitted to the hospital, where he stays for essentially the entire duration of this novel. This is of course based on Greenwell’s own life, as his previously two novels have been too.

The story is told in a very stream-of-consciousness style, with descriptions of things currently happening to our narrator as he is experiencing this medical crisis interspersed with his thoughts wandering off to things outside his hospital room, such as previous life experiences, his relationship with both his partner and his family, as well as the topics of art and poetry specifically. I found this style to be a little hard to follow at times, yet also serving to enrich the story and offering a reprieve from the monotonous day-to-day experience of being “trapped” in your hospital bed.

This book is set around the time of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and discusses both the events of this as well as the events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement in that same timeframe. As someone who was extremely fortunate and has neither lost anyone through Covid nor had anyone experience complications related to it (In fact out of everyone I know who had Covid I somehow seemed to be the only one who had a more extreme reaction) I will ashamedly admit that I really didn’t think about it much after lockdowns were lifted and mask mandates were revoked, so being thrown back into the complicated time that this book references was both a difficult and, I think, important experience, especially with the current outbreak of Mpox, and the way we are seeing it “handled”.

I also liked the way the love between the narrator and his partner L was described, the domestic romanticism of it, as well as the issues that come with domesticity and the narrator’s own hangups and issues, many of which felt painfully relatable.

Overall I enjoyed this a lot more than Garthwell’s first work in this series (which is the wrong term, but the only way I know how to describe it) and it had me wishing I had prioritised reading Cleanness before Small Rain, though I will most definitely get to that as soon as I can.

‘ ‘Small Rain’ is no small feat of literary endeavour. It combines several poetic literary references and philosophical reflections on life, combined with content that reads like a medical memoir.

Stylistically, it’s cleverly experimentative because it’s totally devoid of dialogue. All speech is encapsulated within the text. Also, the names of medical staff are included but capital letters only are used to denote personal relationships, and it fails to name the narrator at all.

Medical details are microscopically described, which is fine by me as an ex-nurse but could be confronting if such things make people feel squeamish. I found it fascinating and integral to the story.

There are graphic descriptions of the protagonist’s symptoms and treatment following an acute admission to a dysfunctional American hospital during the global pandemic.

When the excruciating pain he has is diagnosed as a tear in the aorta, the primal fear and sense of lost agency are clearly depicted here, and familiar to all who have witnessed relatives in a situation like this or have experienced it for themselves.

The themes of the American dream, adaptation to serious illness, medical care, recovery, art, music and love are well described. There’s a relatable immediacy to the text that stirs up similar feelings in the reader, including empathy and sympathy for his plight.

As a poet myself, who writes and enjoys reading poetry books, I mostly loved all the poetic references. As a reader, I appreciated the excellent writing even if the text felt a bit like a professorial discourse sometimes. Grateful thanks to Picador and NetGalley for the eARC.

A very good book on the nature of illness and intimacy, Greenwell’s writing is spectacular in this deeply moving pandemic novel.

I enjoyed this medical memoir about the authors experience of severe medical illness. The offer develops acute abdominal pain which he tries to ignore for a number of days but eventually accepts help and is admitted to hospital. Whilst in hospital they discover his aorta has torn and that he was moments from death.
I started reading this book on the day of a big pain flareup of my own I couldn’t imagine much worse having a pain that you didn’t know the cause for.
I am a doctor and I always find it interesting to read about patient’s experiences of their hospital care.

Garth Greenwell is able to always take a step back from his own body on the hospital bed and write about his experiences in a succinct rather beautiful way. We experience as a reader, his intense fear and the way that she’s able to cope with this by almost disappearing into himself
The feeling as a patient that you have to hand all your positions over to your medical staff and trust them that they’re doing the right thing is very well described. I found particularly moving the section where he feels that the nurse looking after him doesn’t fully understand his care this is utterly terrifying .
I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book is published in the UK on the 19th of September 2024 by Pan McMillan Picador.
This review will appear on Goodreads, NetGalley UK and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.Wordpress.com. It will also appear in Amazon UK after publication.

There is so much going on in this little book..a scary stint in hospital, poetry, relationships, love, construction...impressive novel of our times.

The author involves you in very vivid descriptions of his characters hospital treatments for a torn aorta. Throughout he diverges into telling of his love story with his Spanish partner and the setting up and rescuing of their home. Throughout is sprinkled with his love of poetry.

"Small Rain offers a profound exploration of pain, the fragility of human existence, and the complexities of dreams and dysfunctional system The prose is exceptional, masterfully capturing the unique complexity of life as a hospital patient."

The file could be considerably improved, throughout is --1 and the sentences cut out half way through and go on to another line. I've given stars for the cover, content and description but would need an improved file to give a full review.

Small Rain is a hard one to review- at times I was swept up in its relentless journey through an acute illness and reflections and recollections of life and events leading up to falling ill, at others I was slightly skimming through musings on poetry which didn’t land for me. On reflection I admired it rather than enjoyed it; there are moments that struck a chord with events in my life or those around me and they unexpectedly skewered feelings I’d forgotten about. The Covid timeframe may have contributed to my reactions here.

Greenwell is never an easy read; his books are at least drawn from life if not actually autobiographical, and the exposure can feel brutal. Gripes aside, this is an absorbing experience, with an emotional honesty that is perhaps even more revealing than the explicitly sexual passages in Cleanness

4.5 stars.
Our protagonist suddenly starts suffering from extreme agony.
When he goes to the hospital during a time COVID has caused devastation, the author/protagonist learns that he is suffering from a very dangerous condition. His stay in the hospital is described in exquisite, relatable and yet original detail. Told in the first POV, the author MC lets us in about his relationship with his partner L, his past, his loved ones, and the finer pleasures in life.
A meditative piece on health, privacy, contemplation and the finer details.
Very fine details, indeed.
Greenwell’s writing style is just my cup of tea.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is about appreciating life and health so much more after you suffer the experience of illness. It reads almost like a memoir. My favourite parts were the ones that explored drawing strength from poetry and language.

Small Rain is marketed as a novel, but has the feel and flow of a memoir. It draws heavily on poet Garth Greenwell’s experience of a sudden and serious medical emergency and its aftermath.

He beautifully captures the odd duality of life as a hospital patient, at once the centre of attention and a passive recipient of treatment, his day reduced to its most basic bodily functions while his thoughts turn to the most profound events of his life – his troubled family history, his immersion in music and poetry, his tentative building of a life with a long-term partner.

Small Rain powerfully conveys the way sudden illness upends everything the narrator understands about his life and how he begins to come to terms with a changed, uncertain future.

Small Rain is a novel about a fortysomething man facing a sudden health crisis, and what such an event can lead someone to think and feel. The unnamed narrator has a pain out of nowhere and his partner, L, encourages him to go to the hospital. Once there, it turns out his pain is something serious, something he'd never known of before, and now he's stuck in a hospital bed, experiencing the American healthcare system.

Having read Greenwell's earlier novels, I chose to read this one despite the blurb not being the sort of thing I would usually go for. The focus on hospitals and illness isn't something I'd usually pick up a novel about, not out of squeamishness but more health anxiety and the horrible realities of healthcare, but Small Rain explores someone suddenly in hospital when they weren't expecting to be, and the disorienting effects of assuming your own health and then being told otherwise. Essentially, the story that the novel has—of the time the narrator spends in the hospital—is a way of meditating on ideas of health, life, love, and art, and how the narrator thinks about these things in this context (as the story seems to be autobiographical, presumably some of these things Greenwell also thought about in that context).

The writing style is beautiful, but also picks up on the kinds of routines and details of medicine and healthcare. The narrative has many reflective digressions by the narrator, which mostly add to the portrait and the story, though even as a poet who likes to read and think about poetry I found the one analysing poetry a bit too long and digressive. Generally, I found the novel quite unlike other things I've read, including Greenwell's other novels, in the way that it confronts something so terrifying and mundane in a literary way, exploring some of the complexities of human life and love through this lens. This is not a novel to go into unprepared: it is about being in hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic due to a different health issue, with vivid descriptions of needles going in and other elements that people might find hard to read. I found it full of tenderness and real snippets of emotion; even if it doesn't sound like something you might usually read, it's worth giving it a go.

Exquisite prose, every bit of pain the narrator goes through hits viscerally; definitely not a book for those faint of heart, squeamish or looking for an easy read! Over the course of the book you really come to know the narrator closely and what feels like personally, becoming interwoven with their experiences and seeing the world through their eyes. The book explores political and social themes throughout, one of them most notably the American health care system and its strengths and (possibly more of a focus here!) weaknesses. I loved the intricacies of every character dynamic and interaction; even the nurse who gives out narrator rather short shrift and seems to be a more unsympathetic character still has her other side, one where you understand too where she is coming from, and see the negatives in the narrator’s approach. Not an easy read, but if a literally exploration of these topics is what you are after then look no further.

I am a huge admirer of Greenwell's work although I preferred his debut What Belongs To You to his second novel. This third one has an extra depth and urgency which I would barely have thought possible. I was completely transfixed and invested in the narrator's (clearly autobiographical) brush with death and entire revisiting of what it means and consists of to be alive. This is a profoundly philosophical novel of great humanity, openness and vulnerability. It resonated strongly with me on a personal level, prompting sometimes uncomfortable reflections, and I'm sure that will be the case for many readers. That is the sign of a good novel. I do think his editor should have pushed back on the very long, dry poetry analysis which felt like an unwelcome distraction at one point.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

Wow! This novel had me holding my breath from the first page. A concise and extremely well-written depiction of a man facing a potentially life-threatening condition in the ICU. Structurally, it works well with his memories interspersed between the detailed description of his time in ICU. Lots of reflection on music and art and especially poetry and the impactvotbhas on his life. Throught there is reference to his surviving the disease/condition.

Personally, I really don't like injections and generally being in a hospital makes me feel uncomfortable. The intensively detailed descriptions of the invasive experiences triggered that 'urghhhhh' feeling but I take that as a sign of excellent writing.

I deducted 0.5* for the ending.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a proof.

Unlike anything I have read before in both content and style, the nameless narrator draws the reader into his claustrophobic hospital experience. Doctors swarm around him, treatment is administered, and his thoughts flow from his terrifying situation to poetry, his lover, his family. Curiously the hospital staff all have names whilst those close to him only have initials. I wonder why.

I found the pages of analysis of a poem about a sparrow and some other musings overlong and not so interesting as the observations about being a patient.