Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain is about a man who has a heart/artery issue from a mystery illness and is stuck in the hospital during peak COVID times.

The narrator is an educator and poet who goes from being an intellectual to being acutely in his body as he navigates the mystery illness, the American healthcare system, and his own memories during COVID protocols.

This book is very stream of consciousness which is not something I tend to enjoy personally. It however was so vivid and descriptive of both is his bodily experiences, the care he was receiving, his memories, his loneliness and anxiety that it was hard not to get pulled in and invested in his experiences.

It was at times hard to read because the narrator is so self centered and absorbed in his experience now. I do think this can be an accurate depiction of how many people experience illness, sickness, and other bodily accidents though. I know when I have a bad cold it is hard to care about anyone else and I’m very in my body and that moment. So while it was hard and frustrating to read at times and you kind of want to shake the narrator and tell him to stop whining, I do think it is an accurate depiction of the self absorption humans go through when faced with similar circumstances.

I very much appreciated the memory reflections much more than the hospital components as the hospital parts were so isolated and in his head that the flashbacks gave a bit of a reprieve to that.

This book had some beautiful moments. It is a bit of a quiet and mundane novel and won’t therefore be for everyone. I still thought it has many redeeming qualities and was an interesting read.

I loved this. The MC, a poet, ends up in the ICU after a sudden, devastating, medical episode.

The medical bits were a tough read, and quite upsetting at times but still weirdly beautiful. The rest of the book was also full of beauty, as the MC reflected on music, art, love, poetry and dogs. ❤️

I highly recommend this, from the #toblonglist - it should have made the shortlist. It may even make my favourites of the year.

Gorgeous, moving, tender, and surprising such a page-turner. Reminded me a ton of Knausgaard stylistically, in its hyperrealism and propulsion, and thematically: the crossroads of death and art. The audiobook is a perfect pairing as well.

Garth Greenwell's writing demands attention, care and invites the readers to slow down, to savor each moment. in this story, set during the pandemic, we come to experience the intense world of a character in pain and healing, and through their experience come to ask questions about this world of ours, the health care system and what it means to be well or ill, and see more clearly where it falters.

An ode to life and love – and so far my favourite novel of 2024. Thanks for the ARC provided by NetGalley!

My first covid novel & it was great!! Absolutely touching (I will always love L.'s deer pajamas). Garth Greenwell does time in a fantastic way, love how one small moment becomes paragraphs and paragraphs of backstory / explanation. Thank you Garth!

Thank you FSG for the ARC!

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is a poignant, introspective exploration of desire, identity, and human connection. Set in an unnamed city, the novella follows the relationship between an unnamed narrator and a young man, whose complexities and vulnerabilities challenge the narrator's sense of self. Greenwell’s lyrical prose delves deeply into the emotional landscapes of intimacy, examining how love, shame, and yearning intersect.

While Small Rain is undeniably beautiful in its examination of intimacy and the human condition, its themes of sexuality, mental health, and emotional turmoil are mature. The book's candid portrayal of desire and its explicit sexual content make it more appropriate for older readers. It raises questions about self-acceptance, vulnerability, and the intersections of body and identity. For high school classrooms, the novella might be best suited for advanced students, especially those in literature or LGBTQ+ studies courses, as it requires a certain level of maturity and emotional readiness to engage with its themes fully.

The novel’s emotional depth and literary merit are undeniable, but due to its mature content and complex themes, it may not be appropriate for younger or less mature high school audiences. For the right group, however, it could spark important discussions on sexuality, love, and personal growth.

An elegant novel that drags readers to the center of an experience most people go out of their way to avoid: the vulnerability of having a body. I loathe hospitals (and the ongoing pandemic) but reading this felt moving, not claustrophic (okay a little claustrophobic). Beautifully written and heavily felt; imagine building a world around an experience as terrifying as this one, revising it, stretching it into a novel-length experience. Probably not a beach read. I made me wish for more queer writers discussing sickness and acute, life-threatening conditions in contemporary times. A gorgeous title. Read it when you have space to feel.

A true gut punch of a novel by one of the finest writers of this generation. I found the premise of the novel to hit close to home, so when I read it, I had quite a major emotional response. Please look into trigger warnings before reading if you have any difficulties with medical issue-related storylines, but if you can stomach it, this novel is beautiful and explores so much of the human psyche when we are allowed to sit and think.

Thank you to Garth Greenwell, the publisher, and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Greenwell is a masterful writer with a brilliant voice in his work. This novel is told from the POV of a gentleman who suffers a terrible medical crisis during the pandemic. He hesitates seeking treatment because the hospitals are overwhelmed with pandemic patients. He eventually knows that he must seek treatment and then narrates his journey through the healthcare system. This is a slower paced book but that helps to capture how it would feel to be alone and gravely ill within a hospital setting. This is especially true if you are not a medical person so that all the chaos around you is like being dropped into a foreign land.
Definitely recommend for the literary fiction lovers.
#SmallRain #NetGalley #FarrarStrausLeroux

“That was another thing that had changed over the past decade, the quality of mindlessness, which now was populated by the endless feeds of social media, which didn’t eradicate boredom but changed the texture of it, made it less restorative, less accommodating of creative possibility, I feared.”⁣
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From: 𝘚𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘙𝘢𝘪𝘯 by Garth Greenwell⁣
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Thank you @fsgbooks and @netgalley for the eARC. ⁣
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I find it quite difficult to put my thoughts about this book into words, so bear with me while I give it a try.⁣
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Books about medical conditions, especially set in hospitals, especially in the US, run the risk of being less immersive for me because as a hematologist it is my natural habitat and I tend to criticize all the little details. In this case, there are a LOT of details and even though they were mostly medically correct and portrayed the patient's anxiety well, it took me out of the story for many of those passages, because for me the details weren’t necessary to understand the situation. portrayed the patient's anxiety well s ⁣
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Reading this book, you're in the narrator's mind living through a life threatening medical situation during the COVID pandemic. And it is always humbling to read about a patient’s experience in a hospital (especially in the US, because it is always mindblowing to me how the health system works over there), but in this case I could really feel his anxiety about everything that was happening to him. His thoughts didn't always line up with what he discussed with the nurses and doctors and it's a great reminder to keep exploring your patient's thoughts and feelings, even when they are hesitant or anxious to share them, because I think so many hospital experiences can be made just a little easier by listening to and validating a patient's feelings and answering their questions. ⁣
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My favorite parts of the novel were the moments with his partner L., Ttheir relationship and love felt very real and I also really enjoyed his quiet contemplation about writing and poetry. ⁣
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Have you read this yet? I would love to hear what you think!⁣
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Haunting and beautiful, just as we’ve come to expect from Garth Greenwell. One of my favorite genres of literature is novels written by poets. And this isn’t that. However, Greenwells pose is so mesmerizing and lyrical, that it might as well be. I’ve not encountered one of his novels that hasn’t made me cry. I’m happy to report that this one was no exception to that. Superb.

Reading this is a totally immersive experience, and if you can’t enter into the narrative wholeheartedly, it’s not going to be the book for you. Although I don’t agree with them, I can quite see why some reviewers find it at best unsatisfactory, at worst pretentious and solipsistic. And it is in fact solipsistic, as most autofiction is. The book is one long stream-of-consciousness monologue, with everything described in granular detail, a claustrophobic account of illness and treatment that never lets up. And I loved it. It begins with the narrator experiencing a sudden crippling pain. After days of agony he goes to the ER of his local hospital. It takes a while to get a diagnosis but eventually it’s agreed that he’s suffered an internal aortic dissection (look it up, I had to, and so does the narrator), a conditions that is not only extremely painful but could well be fatal. He discovers that the survival rate in 5 years is only 60%, and this brush with his mortality certainly focuses his mind. He chronicles his treatment and time in the hospital as his world shrinks to one room and one bed in the ICU. He describes the boredom, the isolation, the procedures and the strange intimacy that grows up between himself and his caregivers. Anyone who has spent time in hospital will relate to this. My last stay was during Covid too, and no visitors were allowed, leading to a weird sense of being outside time and place. The narrator can actually have a visitor, his much loved partner, but their life outside the hospital feels very far away. There are many digressions, musings and ruminations. It’s beautifully written, a small canvas, but dealing with large themes and it reflects accurately and with great insight the experience of illness, especially a serious one, and the necessary, often painful treatments.

Beautifully written and often very moving. Read it very quickly, entranced. Will follow this writer wherever he goes.

Garth Greenwell may be one of those super-MFA-style writers, but he is one of the best to do it, and so we all happily gobble up his books. This one included. I read/listened to Small Rain in just a handful of sessions, engrossed as I was fully transported into the time, place, and mind of its narrator.

Small Rain offers a close look at a specific experience — a medical emergency and extended hospital stay, and during COVID to boot — that serves as a pathway for examining and honoring the experiences of love and life. Pulling from real-life experiences, Greenwell dives into the minutiae of being poked and prodded and cared for, which come together to comment on the foreignness of the body, the challenges of losing autonomy (even temporarily), the ways we take our everyday lives (and health) for granted, and the inevitable beauty of whatever love and life we’ve built.

I’ve heard that this book felt tedious to some people, but personally, I found it deeply relatable — I recently had a 3-day hospital stay after an unexpected C-section. Obviously my life was not in danger, as this book’s narrator’s is, but I found myself nodding along to the frequent vitals checks, the blood pressure cuff, the nurse call button, the challenges of using the bathroom independently, the feeling that you are now just a body, and the unique intimacy with nurses even amidst regular shift changes.

The audiobook is read by Greenwell himself, and it is excellent. He narrates in what I can only describe as an MFA-specific style of intonation (if you’ve heard it, you know), but it beautifully suits his flowing, near-musical prose. Highly recommend.



Content and Trigger Warnings:
Medical content (major); Homophobia (minor)

Some novels are remarkable for how their grandiosity and epic vision. Others are remarkable for their attention to the moment-to-moment lived experience of a single life. Still others are remarkable for their ability to show the profundity of the moment-to-moment experience. This is a novel that falls into this final category. It captures with vivid clarity the terror, human connection, and poetic insights that can accompany learning that our bodies can sometimes fail us and reminds us of how we must depend on others. It also provided a rare glimpse into what love between two men can look like amidst the fear of the unknown when facing a medical mystery. I found it to be illuminating!

A calm contemplative novel. The first chapter was too tedious to read, with all the medical procedures and details, I was worried I might not be able to finish it. From the second chapter the book picked up pace and I loved reading rest of the book—all the literary and mundane ruminations, observing and being grateful for the little things. There were a few (3-4) typing erorrs though, I hope it has been corrected.

There's something very strange about reading a novel set in the place where you currently live, and it brings out a contrarian impulse in me -- to dispute things, say that's not how it is, you've misunderstood. I tried to resist it, probably not totally successfully. Similarly, many of the things Greenwell's protagonist references are dear to me -- the poems, Taverner's Western Wind Mass, etc. Simply seeing them discussed was often enough to move me. But I can't in all fairness credit that to the book, I think. The parts of the novel that were more minutely focused on its own imaginative creation -- the hospital, the characters, who are only given full names in case of insignificance? -- were much less effective, often striking me as boring and somewhat artless. There's a very beautiful personal essay/exegesis on Oppen in here that, if excised, would stand even more strongly on its own two sparrow's feet than this novel does on many more.

Despite all that, I think there's much to enjoy here for a different sort of reader than I am. Personally, I would have been happier just reading the poems referenced here, plus Anne Carson's "Life," which basically expresses 80% of the novel's emotional material in its final 8 lines (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/28/life). A good book in many ways, but too slight and slippery for me!

The level of detail and insularity of Small Rain made me think it was an autobiography—I was surprised when I found out was not.

The prose is unrelenting, and flows from one thing to the next, conveying the overwhelming experience as a patient in an American hospital, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I admit that this book was difficult for me to get into at the beginning, but once I did, every time I picked it up, I sank into the story.

The narrator is introspective, taking the story on brief flashbacks before returning back to the situation at hand. Because this is the story of the narrator’s illness, a lot of attention is paid to the medical processes that are done to him externally, from intake at the hospital to a PET scan that happens later in his stay. But there are also sections like when the narrator tries to dissect his love for Oppen’s “Stranger’s Child.” His passion as a poet is moving, and intertwined with the harsh realities of his medical situation, furthers grounds the narrator as a full bodied person (duh, you may say, but it does feel remarkable somehow).

I found the sensitivity and humanity granted to the narrator, to the new nurse, to L, to G, to be very affecting. Even characters that are mentioned for no more than a passage have lingering effects, such as the narrator’s mother and her reaction to the narrator’s illness.

A very beautiful read.

In Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain an unnamed poet in his early forties is stricken with acute abdominal pain. After suffering at home for several days (the COVID-19 pandemic is raging, and he is reluctant to visit the hospital), he finally capitulates to the pleas of his alarmed partner and ends up in the ER, where doctors discover that he has a life-threatening aortic tear. Much of the rest of the novel is set in an ICU hospital bed.

Although his body may be tethered to a bed with IV lines and monitors, the poet’s thoughts roam widely. Greenwell provides the reader with a close look at an ordinary—and thus extraordinary—human life at the very moment in which the future is most uncertain. Greenwell is a master at interiority. The poet’s narrative voice is compelling: empathic, self-critical and often dismissive of his own perceptions, but also vulnerable and open to reflection: "I sat in a chair while she took my blood pressure and temperature….I disliked her, I realized, I felt an antipathy she hadn’t earned. Probably she was exhausted; I can’t imagine it, day after day seeing people in pain, at their worst moments, over years; how could you protect yourself from that, I wondered, there was some human regard I wanted from her that I had no right to demand."

Throughout the novel, Greenwell provides the reader with a close look at an ordinary—and thus extraordinary—human life at the very moment in which the future is most uncertain. Even as the poet experiences his unique medical crisis, the entire world is facing an unprecedented pandemic, and its accompanying anxiety about what that might mean for the future. Greenwell expertly adjusts his narrative lens so that it continually shifts from the closeup and personal to the wide-angled and universal.

The protagonist in Small Rain appears to bear a close resemblance to the author himself—both are writers raised in Kentucky and living in Iowa City with their life partners (the L. of the novel may represent Greenwell’s real partner, the poet Luis Muñoz, who is a professor at the University of Iowa). An alter-ego narrative choice is not new to Greenwell. Despite being very different from Small Rain in their setting (both are set in Sofia, Bulgaria) and their subject matter (both foreground queer sexuality and desire), Greenwell’s previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), have similar first-person voices. Perhaps the question of whether the novel is fiction or memoir is not relevant. Either way, we are presented with a protagonist accustomed to close observation, to noticing details, and to attending to their accompanying impressions.

Poetry plays an important part in Small Rain, which takes its name from the Medieval poem “Westyrn Winds”:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!”

The lament of those words echoes across the years and reminds us of the long tradition of people in moments of heightened experience turning to poetry to help articulate the depth of their desire and pain. And too, the artist reminds us that the deep yearning for home and family is very much a part of the makeup of humankind.

The poet is also thinking about the work of twentieth-century American poet, George Oppen (See Beyond the Book). In his hospital bed, the poet remembers his attempt to introduce his literature students to a favorite Oppen poem about a sparrow. “I wanted to tell them, this record of a mind’s noticing, a moment of particularizing attention. From a flock of sparrows this sparrow, in a forest” The sparrow of the poem is both individual and representative of other sparrows—perhaps all sparrows—throughout time. And this may be the entire impulse behind Garth Greenwell’s endeavor in writing this novel. His protagonist reflects on the core challenge with art: wanting to be “faithful to the concrete, particular thing,” but also “wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative.”

As the poet in the novel processes his time in the hospital—the vague and inconclusive tests; the cheerful but evasive jargon of doctors and nurses; the days that blur into one another; the sharp and constant fear—his appetites for the world are sharpened. He eats a potato chip, and it is like new. He drinks a coffee, and coffee has never better. As he realizes how close he has come to death, his life becomes very sweet. In his newly weakened state, he holds the world close. And of course, that is Greenwell’s gift, to ask the reader how one can live their life with true appreciation, paying close attention to the full gamut of sorrow and joy in the world.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher.
An edited version of this review and a "beyond the book essay" were published in the 4 Sept online journal Bookbrowse