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

Garth Greenwell has established himself as a great writer with the success of his previous two books. Small Rain does not disappoint.

A thought provoking, often mesmerizing account of one person's illness and how he landed in a hospital bed for a week long stay. At times frightening and scary, the story weaves in and out of the characters thoughts and remembrances. A most heartfelt novel that will have you thinking about your own mortality, how you might handle a similar predicament, and the permission that we need to give ourselves to feel everything, and at times, nothing at all.

Alert- talk of detailed medical procedures await....but worth every squeamish moment.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book!

I really loved this one! I liked but didn't love What Belongs To You, but for a novel written in a similar autofictional style, this one really hit me. This book is such a crystallization of a singular event, which seems like it could be boring or overdone but ends up really effectively describing and memorializing the experience, in this case ending up in the hospital after a mysterious and terrifying health event during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of the book follows the thought digressions and reflections of our narrator into the history of his relationship with his partner, the saga of buying and redoing their house, poetry and poets he loves, a violent storm and the damages that follow, but all of these sections flowed so well into the main hospital plotline and all felt valuable in their various ways. This book really feels like the best of autofiction, in that it almost reads as autobiography but better. Definitely recommended.

This novel started off very strong to me, and ultimately I enjoyed it but there were was one aspect I will elaborate on in a moment that I found unsatisfactory. Greenwell’s skill as a writer is clear, and the stream of consciousness of the main character flowed throughout all the events of the novel. It follows a (self-insert) poet who shares the details of his life with Greenwell himself as he navigates a sudden medical emergency in the midst of the pandemic. His descriptions of being in the hospital were so jarringly real when compared to at least my own personal ones when I’ve been hospitalized, that I could even feel the anxiety and fear myself. At times it was also a love letter to all the frontline medical workers, and even though the realism felt TOO real at times, I think this is the first novel about the pandemic that I didn’t hate. Another aspect I loved was being able to read the inner workings an adult queer marriage that was so loving and supportive of each other throughout, without glossing over the reality of being in a long term relationship. My main issue with SMALL RAIN was that the autofiction in this novel felt self serving to me at many points, and it led to many tangents in the main character’s thought process that would go in for longer than necessary, to the point in which I felt their purpose to the overall story was lost.

Small Rain is the best book I've read this year. The prose is gorgeous. It's a book full of love. I'm so happy to have read it. It's as if this book gave me back a part of myself I'd forgotten to remember.

This book is excruciating, but I don’t mean that as a criticism—it’s meant to be. It’s well under 300 pages, but took me more than two weeks to read because I had to keep taking breaks. Set in Iowa City during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this semi-autobiographical novel largely consists of the narrator’s internal monologue as he is hospitalized for a condition that is usually fatal. With his survival in question, he reflects on the intense vulnerability of being hospitalized in a pandemic and on his life in general. Although these reflections span his childhood in Kentucky to his relationship with his partner L, the book felt very in-the-moment to me, given the precision with which Greenwell crafts each sentence, and that the sentences and paragraphs are long. An inserted IV is as immediate as the narrator’s early days in Iowa City.

I have read some books in which COVID is somehow incidental, and this is not one of them. The fear, intensity, and overwhelm of those early pandemic days defines this book. It means the narrator is contemplating mortality upon contemplating mortality. That he’s mostly alone in the hospital, allowed only brief masked visits from L. It means he wonders if he’ll become collateral damage. The doctors and nurses have whole names in the text, while family members are “L” and “G,” underscoring that his public life, in the pandemic, is in the hospital. I flashed back to my (thankfully separate, and less dire) hospital and pandemic experiences.

Descriptions of small medical humiliations and large uncertainties were captivating, and I loved the narrator’s favorite nurse. The best part of this novel, though, is the moving depiction of his relationship with L, the small tendernesses they share, the ways they laugh at each other for being so European and so American. It’s a perfect relationship in how real it feels, especially as the narrator reflects on the horror-show renovation of the home they purchased together. I thought the novel lost some steam towards the end, but the frequently excruciating experience of reading paid off.

Is “hospital fiction” a genre? If so, then this should definitely be in the best-of list.

The premise sounds simple — a man feels a sharp pain and goes to the hospital days later when it doesn’t go away, and this book is a chronicle of what happens next. But the end result is much more than that.

The descriptions are immersive and vivid, capturing the anxiety and boredom and discomfort and alienation experienced in this place entirely focused on preserving life but at the same time impersonal and sterile. The narration flows effortlessly between the present in the hospital to past recollections, sometimes rendered absurd and sometimes poignant with this new awareness of mortality.

A beautiful book that will stick with me for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC!

Greenwell takes a curiosity approach to sympathy and empathy. In the wake of discovering having a life threatening illness, it opens up vulnerable positions characters can find themselves in while in the face of their own roles: doctors, nurses, friends, lovers. Isn’t treating others with a kindness in life a prerequisite to how we learn to treat others? These are the kinds of questions Small Rain asks. Greenwell masters a sensible duty to judging oneself against all of these feelings while quietly prying open at the neediness of the desire to be known.

Garth Greenwell is one of my top 3 favorite writers. He is brilliant! I loved this book and cannot stop thinking about it. It is beautifully written. I am always amazed by the depth of Garth's writing.

This was beautifully realized and written and deeply affecting most of the time; there was too much in the latter half, though, that just made my eyes cross a bit (specifically the pages upon pages of talk of poetry - and that's from someone who's taken several poetry seminars in grad school). And I don't know if I fully understand what actually happened to the narrator and how it was fixed, or if it was even fixed at all, but then I wondered if that was the point?

There's a lot to think about here.

A book about a man who goes to the hospital and has various thoughts and ruminations on illness, healthcare in America, writing, his relationship. Garth Greenwell is a talented author and I enjoyed this one.

I have only read one Garth Greenwell article before I jumped onto this new novel by him. I knew of his writing style and yet I jumped into this book. Streams of consciousness are not my favourite writing style. Particularly why? this novel proved as much. however that is a personal preference and opinion.

Building upon our collective experiences during Covid times specially within hospitals, Greenwell‘s protagonist, and unnamed author again (likely himself), talks about individual in hospital. The lack of privacy, shame, the fragility of life and body with seemingly simple functions all come into focus. Reflecting upon his life and his experiences, interspersed with Present day hospital experiences.

Greenwell usually focuses much on prose than the plot. The stream of consciousness can go off in varying different tangents, while comparing current state of being. Yes, all of that is true and how he explains it, but it goes on and on. The letting go of punctuations also hampers where the thought ends and the descriptive begin. While it is not a personal preference of style of prose, there is a story here.

Succeeding in creating a vivid experience of hospitals, we are one is very vulnerable and susceptible to not only hanging between life and death but also depending on the care of who they are under. It gives people a chance to reflect back on the lives, their their journey and the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. At many points to self refractory prose meandered off into different directions, depending on the experience, observations and interactions of our protagonist and more than I would have liked before being pulled in again. It keeps going on and on without any threads

The prose is not to my personal taste, but there is a concrete story here under all that prose, about the experiences that is relatable for those of us who have gone through it (raises hand). But like he goes on to describe one of his favourite poems, like it, his prose takes a while to get the hang of and is difficult to comprehend at times the way in which Greenwell wrote the story - wandering and wavering, yet underneath it all, just like the poem he revers there’s a story to be unearthed.”isn't the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can't quite make sense of it - so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible!”

Thank you NetGalley and FSG for the ARC in exchange for the review

At first glance, this novel feel starkly different from Greenwell's earlier fiction. "What Belongs to You" and "Cleanness", both set in Bulgaria, explore the gritty spaces of gay kink, anonymous sex and sadomasochism. In contrast, "Small Rain" feels like a middle-aged sequel (all his novels are autofictional to some extent), the story of a gay man in Iowa (once a teacher in Bulgaria) who has developed a life-threatening case of aortitis. When he arrives at the hospital, at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, he is a baffling mystery to his doctors. His nurse tells him repeatedly, "you are very interesting", as if he were an object of curiosity rather than a patient of care. Most cases of aortitis occur in the elderly but he has no medical preconditions and no obvious infection. He is shuttled from the ER to ICU, subjected to a battery of blood tests, ultra sounds and cat scans, and his skin becomes a checkerboard of bruises from all the IV drips, injections and catheters inserted into his arms, legs and stomach—this is worlds away from Eastern European fetish dungeons of his earlier novels. But nonetheless, Greenwell distinguishes himself as a poetic authority on intimacy and voyeurism except, in this novel, these themes are foregrounded in the hospital ward rather than the bedroom. Specialists visit, followed by a train of medical students, and constantly examine and question him at all hours. The narrator is watched, prodded, massaged, and needled, and he has to become used to strangers helping him walk, move and urinate. The hospital is a paradoxical site: cold and impersonal but still intimate and tactile. In that respect, the hospital actually isn't so different from the cruising spot—a place where a man is more of a body and less of a person. The sexual passivity of the gay man in "Cleanness" becomes the clinical passivity of the patient in "Small Rain". In one particularly poignant moment, he describes how the "particularizing attention of the doctors, the precise data they collected about my body had nothing to do with me". It's eerily like a one-night hook-up, the man reduced to an assemblage of flesh to be gazed at and quickly handled.

I thought this was a beautiful novel that turned the excruciating uncertainty and long waiting-times of hospital care into a poetic meditation on the body and suffering. In the hospital, language seems to break down. He is asked to rate his pain on a scale but he's not sure if his "8" corresponds to what his doctors understand by "8" (and as Wittgenstein would say, pain is a fundamentally private sensation that cannot be communicated, that cannot transcend our intersubjective boundaries—no one can directly share their own internal experiences; no one can objectively feel someone else's pain). Greenwell's novel is in some ways an attempt to make sense of this pain and his fragile physical and mental health. The narrator's own body is an enigma to him—a machine, a piece of circuitry, a complex object he had never thought about until it became dysfunctional. The doctors use a vocabulary that sometimes stuns and sometimes distresses him. His doctor mentions the possibility of a "false lumen" and he immediately thinks how beautiful it sounds; a nurse describes poppers as "vasodilators" and he just thinks, "what a beautiful word". The technical jargon and Latinate flourishes (the "lumen" and "vena cava") of the specialists are, in his literary mind, a source of verbal wonder rather than a clear-cut explanation. But the metaphors the doctors use are equally disturbing to him: one says that they will be "carpet-bombing" his veins and he is alarmed. He's not sure what is happening to his own body or what the treatments are doing exactly—the doctor-speak is shrouded in the hermetic verbiage of the medical textbook or garbled by some vulgar hyperbole. The hospital exposes everything he doesn't know about himself—his internal anatomy, his mental fragility, the limits of his language.

This makes it all sound highfalutin and philosophical and I'm not giving the novel full justice. It's a highly readable story that dramatizes the bewildering failures and obstacles of healthcare in America, the insurance companies refusing to pay for a procedure, the inexperienced nurse obstinately unwilling to listen to his pleas, the dispassionate doctors dismissing his questions; it's a reminder of the COVID era—the paralyzing uncertainty, the mounting death tolls, the culture war over masking, the state-by-state policies, the contradictory health advice, a collective trauma which already seems to be selectively disappearing into partisan amnesia. It's also a love story, a man isolated in a room, waiting for his boyfriend to be allowed to visit him. A beautiful story.

Despite taking place almost entirely within the confines of a hospital bed, Small Rain is an expansive and searching meditation on life. The narrator's interiority becomes the vessel for an exploration of art, music and love's lineaments. Pain is an environment you enter and exit; never before have I encountered prose that captures that so effectively. I was deeply moved by this novel and struck by passages I won't soon forget.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

Small Rain follows a narrator through the harrowing experience of a medical emergency that forces him to reckon with everything humanity has to offer.

I had the distinct pleasure, when I was in grad school, of hearing Garth Greenwell talk. I've never heard a talk like it, before or since. My friends and I were hypnotized. It was like I couldn't move or breathe for fear of breaking some magic spell that Garth was weaving from behind that podium. Ever since, every piece of Garth Greenwell's writing that I read, I hear with that same beautiful fervor that he had in his talk. Small Rain is even more gorgeously written than I knew it would be, and I was as glued to this book as I was to that talk all those years ago. I don't read lit fic in a single sitting, but I read this book in a single sitting. I wish I could pin down exactly what it is that makes Garth Greenwell's writing feel so life-changing, but it is many things -- the scope, the delicacy, the generosity. Greenwell's spectacular ability to connect to a feeling of such realness, such life and the full force of human emotion, to every single word is truly a sight to behold. I'd recommend a Garth Greenwell book even if I'd never read it, but having read -- and been permanently changed -- by the experience of reading Small Rain, I'd especially recommend this book to anyone who is willing to give it a go.

Greenwell has been one of my favorite writers since CLEANNESS, and this book takes my favorite elements of his writing—narrative that wanders along the contours of a mind, prose that is in touch with embodiment—and applies them to a rather new setting. Far from the Bulgaria of CLEANNESS and WHAT BELONGS TO YOU, we find ourselves in an ICU in Iowa City; the narrator is afflicted by an infrarenal aortic dissection. Although the circumstances are drab and dispiriting, Greenwell turns them into an enthralling read with his reflections on the love-hate relationship we have with our bodies, the submission required of a medical patient, and the subtle splintering of a family.

A kaleidoscopic literary page turner about a man’s mystery illness during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I really loved this book because it got really deep in ways I didn’t expect. There was the main plot of the middle aged gay narrator describing his pain and time in the hospital, closer to death than he had ever been before. This really propelled the narrative forward. Garth Greenwell is such a gifted writer. As nurses and doctors try to investigate his history to see what might have caused an aortic rupture in his body, the narrative breaks into small reflections and introspective asides of his history and the moments that have made up his life as he also searches for the cause.

This book was a stark reminder of not taking health for granted. To be human and healthy we have everything. Once that is stripped away, we must face our mortality, which is a truly frightening aspect of being alive. But what made the book beautiful was that it became a meditative exploration of life itself and an ode to the soul inside the shell of our bodies. Highly recommend!

"Small rain" by Garth Greenwell was exactly what I thought it'd be and very different at the same time.
I wasn't expecting the covid era (which triggered me a bit, but kind of felt very nostalgic) and the hospital setting made me uneasy. But the intimate, vulnerable and honest portrayal of our main character's life experiences made it all better.

I enjoyed this book for the most part, but unfortunately the writing style wasn't my favorite and I felt like I was in a dark forest trying to find a way out.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC.