Small Rain

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A gay poet struggles with a mysterious and agonizing pain in Greenwell’s intense latest (after Cleanness). Wracked with debilitating agony that stretches through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator is urged by his partner, L, to see a doctor. After waiting for hours in the emergency room, he endures a battery of examinations and tests. Eventually, he receives a shocking diagnosis of life-threatening aortic tearing. Weeks of hospitalization and grueling procedures follow, and over the course of his slow recovery, the narrator juxtaposes raw depictions of his vulnerability and helplessness with excoriating critiques of the healthcare industry’s inequities and inefficiencies and the alienation he feels among the “relentlessly heterosexual” staff. The narrator also reflects on his dysfunctional family history; meeting L as a creative writing student in Iowa City, where he’s remained after graduating seven years earlier; and the negotiations he and L have gone through to find happiness and fulfillment in their shared living space. The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator’s bracing account of his grueling ordeal (“The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale”), serving as a palpable reminder to never take one’s health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA.