Small Rain
by Garth Greenwell
When I heard that Garth Greenwell’s latest book, Small Rain, was about sickness, pain, and hospitalization, though I greatly admire his writing, I decided this was a novel I would never read. Then I saw Parul Sehgal’s review in The New Yorker, September 9, 2024.
“Small Rain” is not a book about the hospital or the medical system, however; it unfurls internally, in the consciousness of a character, a consciousness aware of itself evolving, shaped by a terrible new pain and knowledge. Tangled in tubes, with machines that beep and bring constant news of his body, the narrator participates in a similar activity, of self-monitoring, retrieval, and discovery; he watches himself, he learns about himself, but he relies on an older technology—he uses the sentence.
What sort of technology is a sentence? It can reflect, like a mirror; it can reveal, like an X-ray. It can arrange and bring order to chaos, like a pair of hands. It can dilate, split, and suture, bridge the private and public selves. Form follows function, and Greenwell’s sentences are marked by their distinctive shape.
I rushed out and bought the book. An evening after reading the first breathtaking chapter of Small Rain—which takes place as he is manipulated and tested in the ER in a flurry of activity, IV insertions, waiting for tests scans, for what turns out to be an aneurism in the valve of his heart, a torn artery—I found myself in the ER with my husband, Arthur, who had pneumonia and emphysema and was having trouble breathing. Two years ago, he was in the hospital with pneumonia for over a month. This can’t happen again—I strangled that thought as it conveyed its opposite. Throughout his being questioned and inspected and treated with nebulizer and prednisone and waiting for a CT scan, over the course of seven hours, my mind didn’t wander, no Greenwell-like reflections or observations, it needed complete distraction.
As Arthur lay on the bed in the tiny curtained ER area, he, too, couldn’t do anything; he didn’t even look at his phone, which he was usually attached to like an IV. While he lay there, without swiping and clicking, his intense staring at the ceiling seemed to act as a sedative.
My fear was so intense, like pain, unmeasurable, that I couldn’t scroll over social media or call or text anyone, not even family members. Instead, I focused hard on the games on my phone. Mind-numbing and deadening, they held me in a trance. The cards of FreeCell, the numbers in squares of Sudoku and Killer Sudoku, the colored tubes of Water Sort. Over and over. Press the restart button. Wait for the ad to pass. No way to go forward. Stop thinking. Restart. Restart. Restart.
Arthur’s breathing improved and he was released with a script of Prednisone to go with his antibiotics. As he convalesced, I continued with Small Rain.
In the second chapter, the unnamed narrator is in the ICU and, unlike the way Arthur and I experienced the hospital, he continues to observe, analyze, digress. “My whole arm was covered in blood, it soaked the drape in dark wet patches. My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that 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.”
The novel is also a love story. His hospitalization occurs during the first few months when Covid ran rampant, so visits in this hospital are limited to one a day, and that for two hours. As we readers wait for his partner L to arrive, we are treated to the backstory: his University Professor in Iowa invites him to a dinner party where she maneuvers to have L seated next to him, two single gay poets she thought should meet. L doesn’t speak English so well and the narrator struggles through with his French, Portuguese, and even Latin. Once together, they stick and even buy a house.
After L visits, the narrator thinks, “I felt a desolation that surprised me with its force, that didn’t lighten until the oxy deadened it, making it something I didn’t feel exactly but sensed hovering, not inside me but an object in the world.” The narrator has a setback, horrible pain returns, and, as he is waiting to learn what is happening from his doctor, he slips into a lengthy portrayal of the trials of doing renovations on the home he and L just purchased. I was so caught up in this wild story of construction worker insurrection that its use in making the time pass waiting for the doctor, actually fulfilled that function, much as an editor cuts away in a crime film as the murderer is about to strike.
Then I found the devastating review by Dwight Garner in The New York Times, September 9, 2024, updated September 16, 2024. He doesn’t find the beauty in Greenwell’s sentences as Parul Sehgal did, but instead writes, “His sentences are long and strung with clauses and subclauses; the paragraphs and chapters are long as well. Each page is a tall palisade one must climb slowly down, with little hope of a place for eyes and wits to rest.”
One opinion is truth, but so is the other. In a kind of convoluted Greenwellian way, I enjoy the clashing views of his novel, of his sentences. As I read Small Rain, I occasionally feel, in a rare moment, my concentration fall away as he delivers a lengthy academic yet emotional exegesis of a short poem, then I’ll be brought back into the ecstatic, undulating writing that made me feel the love he had for L or a poetry or get me to see, to comprehend in an emotional way, the strands of ideas he finds beneath the commonest circumstances including a consideration of his own usefulness as a human, leading me to examine my own.
The narrator is home curled in L’s arms at the end of penultimate section. “That was what we had built together, I thought, the real unprecedent thing, a happiness that was equally ours, his and mine, and falling asleep now meant falling into it, into the noise of contentment he made as he held me more tightly, his happiness that was my happiness too, my happiness that was his.” The very end is given over to his sister’s dog—oops, I don’t want be a spoiler, you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out. I was enthralled by Small Rain. I hope you will be too.
— Jan Schmidt
* * *