Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’.
But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like ‘someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked’. After suffering an aortic tear, the narrator finds himself in a disorienting world of beeping machines and doctors visiting at all hours. We then track his spell as a patient in ICU.
Set in 2020 during the pandemic, the novel is necessarily restricted. The action is confined to a hospital bed, with IV lines and drips preventing its narrator from moving freely. There are few characters: a friendly doctor, and another unable to conceal her excitement at being involved in such an ‘interesting’ case; a kind, caring nurse, and her slapdash counterpart. The narrator has a partner, identified only as L, who visits him in the afternoons. Their intimacy is somewhat inhibited by the masks they wear.
This is a novel of detail, describing scans and the difficulty of performing simple bodily tasks. But it expands far beyond its notional restrictions. Hospital days act as an anchor for the narrator’s reminiscences about his past life in Bulgaria, his love of poetry and his home life with L – the ‘little graces’ of flowers, teapots and domesticity. The narrative is saturated with references to literature. A poem by George Oppen about a sparrow is remembered when the narrator looks out of his window; sonnets by Shakespeare and aubades by John Donne rattle around the inside of the PET-scan machine. When pain makes speech impossible, the words of others need to be borrowed.
We end up back outside the hospital; but much has changed. This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details.
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