Small Rain by Garth Greenwell review – the lessons of pain
The author of Cleanness considers the physicality of suffering through the experiences of a poet hospitalised during Covid
Garth Greenwell is best known for autobiographical fiction about sex and the body, but with Small Rain, the American author now turns to the physicality of suffering. In sparse prose interspersed with occasional lyrical musings, a nameless poet is diagnosed with a small tear in his aorta, which results in a long stay in a clinic, where he shuffles from the ER to the ICU.
A strange pain takes over his life, becoming “a kind of environment, a medium of existence”. This is the first of Greenwell’s novels to be set in the US, in a hospital in Iowa. Set against the beginning of the Covid pandemic, it asks poignant questions about care, connectivity and community. What do we owe one another in “the project of being a human being”?
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