The New Yorker:

Garth Greenwell has been lauded for his depiction of sex. His latest novel, “Small Rain,” unfurls within the consciousness of a patient hospitalized with a rare vascular condition.

By Parul Sehgal

Pain, it has been said, is the great censor, the eater of words. Pain shatters language; it remains untranslatable—not just anti-narrative but pre-narrative, calling us back to our first sounds. In the canon of illness writing, there are those accounts—Alphonse Daudet’s “In the Land of Pain” and Christina Crosby’s “A Body, Undone,” to name two—which closely observe how pain shapes a life, how it exists both within and alongside the self as antagonist and intimate companion (Nietzsche called his chronic pain his dog). Typically, however, writers do not sit long with their pain; they busy themselves with the history, the social meanings of sickness. Pain, on its own, seems to have no plot; as Emily Dickinson wrote, it “has an Element of Blank.”

Perhaps it is a great anatomist of pleasure who can fill in some of the blanks in the story of pain. Garth Greenwell, the author of two previous works of fiction, “What Belongs to You” (2016) and “Cleanness” (2020), has been lauded for his depiction of sex—our “densest form of communication,” he calls it. His sinuous, stately sentences have brought a formal feeling to scenes of cruising; public bathrooms have become versions of the nineteenth-century ballroom, full of their own occult codes, hierarchies, the season’s new beauties. The books have followed the same narrator—a writer and a Southerner by birth, who has spent time teaching poetry in Bulgaria. We meet him again in Greenwell’s latest novel, “Small Rain,” in the late summer of 2020. He is now living in Iowa, teaching at a college. He is working in his study when it happens: he feels a twisting pain in his stomach, as if “someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked, trying to turn me inside out and failing and trying again,” he says. “Like that, while somebody else kneed me in the groin.” For eight hours, he crouches on all fours, waiting for the pain to subside. His partner—a man identified only as L—begs him to seek treatment, but the pandemic is blazing; hospitals seem unthinkably dangerous.

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