Garth Greenwell is a gem of a writer, and I was so thrilled to get an early copy of his upcoming book. He writes about intimacy so well, and has quite the way with words. While his other books featured a fair amount of physical intimacy, his newest Small Rain highlights intimacy and vulnerability in another light. Our unnamed narrator is a poet and teacher living in Iowa City with his partner, a fellow teacher "L." While at home he encounters a sharp all encompassing pain. He tries for days to fight through it (such a man!), and eventually goes to urgent care. It turns out something very serious and potentially deadly has happened to him. What follows is a tale of his time traversing the complex American health system during COVID as doctors try to figure out what has caused his condition that does not normally occur in healthy men his age. He is scared and unsure what is going on with his body, something he normally has not spent a lot of time thinking about. Because as a poet he spends so much of his time with internal thoughts and observations, it is fascinating to live through his experience with his medical emergency. He focuses in on the words that his care team use and when he sees a sparrow outside his window, thinks about a favorite poem of his. The reader also is able to see overlaps with the stress and unknowns he is experiencing mirrored in the house that he and L purchased and are still dealing with the ramifications of being homeowners. The relationship between the two men is special and they deeply care for one another. This book is deeply moving and if readers enjoyed Greenwell's previous books, they will adore this one as well. I will continue to pick up anything he writes.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

What a wonderful book. Yes, the subject matter includes illness and dying, and yet the novel is bright with love, appreciation, art and purity. Having not read Greenwell before, I was impressed with his soft-spoken, simple, translucent narration and the deceptive technique of focusing on immediacy while also balancing larger philosophical and creative issues. I could have done without the long central section on poetry, but otherwise this seemed a faultless and limped piece of writing, crystal clear in its vision. Bravo.

Took the breath right out of me. Small Rain is somehow sprawling yet condensed, an operatic meditation on art and love, unlike anything I've read before.

Garth Greenwell’s latest reads like an interlude. At once a continuation of “What Belongs to You” and “Cleanness,” it is tamer by comparison. It finds our protagonist—conceivably the same one from the earlier books and closely resembling Greenwell—in an Iowa City hospital at the height of the pandemic after a debilitating pain sends him to the emergency room. What follows is an extended internal monologue that details his stay as doctors try to figure out what’s wrong with him. The narrative is largely a play-by-play of his time there, oddly gripping and uncomfortably tense in its realism, interspersed with personal reflections.

This shouldn’t be as captivating as it is. In less capable hands, it easily could have been trite, even preachy. But Greenwell transforms a contained event into a meandering musing on life, art, and love. I couldn’t put it down at a certain point. It is a masterclass in sustained voice. Thankfully this is more than a COVID novel (no more of these, please). Though the pandemic is everywhere present and raises the story’s stakes, meaning isn’t limited to it.

Intimacy courses through “Small Rain,” and Greenwell adds a nuanced dimension to the discourse on desire, passivity, and care he’s explored previously. Greenwell’s prose is splendid, lucid yet poetic, with sentences that weave and run-on as the ideas the novel grapples with come into focus.

There are whiffs of self-indulgence here, but it doesn’t really matter. Greenwell gets away with almost everything. He writes so beautifully and has created a structure that accommodates tangents and asides that would otherwise seem out of place.

This is a deeply tender book, one that offers a more affirmative, less shameful representation of queerness. It might even go too far in that direction (the ending was a bit twee for me). I miss the subversive side of Greenwell that emerged most powerfully in “Cleanness,” and I am still waiting for him to pen the expansive gay masterpiece I know he is capable of. Until then, here is another impressive work from one of our great writers.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell was a touching meditation on life and the American healthcare system told through the lens of an unexpected illness during the pandemic.

In the beginning of the book, our main character(MC) finds himself hospitalized during the COVID pandemic for severe pain. Through a series of invasive tests, our MC is diagnosed with an aortic dissection, highly unusual for his age. His condition worsens and he ends up having an extended stay in the ICU.

At first I had a hard time getting into this book. I found the subject matter stressful and I felt hesitant each time I picked it up to read. One day recently, I decided to give this book the time it deserved and I’m happy I did. The MC at one point being tuned to the frequency of a certain painting. Around the midway point, I found myself tuned to the frequency of this book. As our MC spends time in the ICU, he’s reminded of aspects of his life through his interactions with nurses and doctors, mostly good, sometimes bad. I found his recollections moving and I adored the tenderness he shared with his partner, L. In fact, that was my favorite part of the book. I found the love they shared carried me though some of the more stressful aspects of the book and it served as a reminder of what is important.

Greenwell’s writing is wonderful, at many times beautiful, and I very much enjoyed this book.

Thank you to @fsgbooks for the ARC💕

Gosh this was good. Immersive from the jump, really beautiful on a sentence level, and sensitive on a difficult topic.

• love love LOVE this book!!! wow!
• a queer poet reflects on his life when he is brought to the ICU with a mysterious illness
• a lot of ruminating on the american healthcare system with greenwell’s customary stunning prose
• a careful, beautiful look at humanity, art, love, a the ‘american dream’
• i honestly think i will read anything by this author, he can do no wrong

I have loved Garth Greenwell's books and writing and look forward to his newsletter every now and then, watching everything he mentions!
This novel was surprising to me, somehow, a touch more sentimental than I expected but warm and close. I love the quality of being very present with the character's thoughts, like the flow of time, moving from rich inner ideas, one to the next, but also flowing into fear, anxiety and sometimes that strange sense of self-questioning shame I think we are all beset with. This book felt oddly most personal than the others- and I couldn't tell why. Perhaps having lived through the same things, and read the same news cycles, one felt more close to the narrator thinking through how to make sense of the pandemic, love and the world. I really LOVED discovering the story of the title, and the way art and literature buttress the free flowing thoughts of the narrator, and somehow felt deeply moved by the story of the tree and the storm. Very lucky to read such rich writing that feels so close to one, and human, while feeling delicate, thoughtful and full of craft.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC!

This will surprise no one to hear, but Small Rain is exquisitely lovely. It's the careful, smart prose you'd accept from Greenwell with the very contemporary story of sickness and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Compelling, urgent and necessary. 'Small Rain' is an audacious novel that takes us on the terrifying journey of a patient admitted to hospital, at the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic. On one level, it's an examination of the body and health care, the experience of the patient and the work of the professionals who labour tirelessly against the diseases and maladies that cause pain, suffering and death. Yet, on another level, it's a profoundly personal reflection, interrogating the life, and love and lust of a single character, and the passionate relationship he has with his partner. Finally, it's an examination of poetry, of literary creativity, the power of words on the page, and the challenge of teaching words which, to you are sublime, and yet to beyond the experience and thus comprehension of a high school literature student. It is, of course, all of these and more.

I read this novel in two sittings, but it could easily have been one. I underlined words, sentences and paragraphs. I've long admited Greenwall's work, his way with language, the art of his craft, and 'Small Rain' is a master class in the magic of the sentence.

I am waiting for general release so that I can purchase a copy and reread it with a pencil in my hand. Easily the best book I've read so far this year.

this was great! i really really liked the way greenwell tackles the often-frustrating relationship that we tend to have with our bodies, even more so when we become sick and the pain becomes chronic or complex. the main character reminded me of a gay william stoner (which is the highest compliment i can give him; ‘stoner’ has been my favourite novel for well over ten years now), and i really liked the way his relationship with his own body as well as other people was explored. overall, a fantastic read!

4.5 stars rounded up. There are moments in life when you know you’re bestowed the unique experience of engaging with something rare and beautiful. You know it is a precious thing that not everyone gets and your gratitude for being alive and stumbling into it’s presence swells within you. It makes you feel alive, like this bleak world, for a moment, has meaning. Some of the best literature gets me there, but honestly it is a rare experience despite trying to read as much as I can. Garth Greenwell’s writing takes me there and I am forever grateful to have stumbled upon him. His prose has a distinctive, intimate eloquence in honing in on human emotion to examine our vulnerability in such a touching and fulfilling way. You may never have experienced the exact situations or emotions his characters go through, but you find that the wall between character and reader evanescences with his writing.

In Small Rain, we follow a middle-aged gay writer who unexpectedly has a life-threatening and life-altering medical crisis, compelling him to navigates his own mortality and vulnerability within a US healthcare system just past the first swell of the COVID pandemic but still in the thick of it.

I was nervous to delve into this because, like many of us, the pandemic gave me PTSD and revisiting it can often strain scars freshly knit. While this did elicit all of the negative emotions I experienced during the pandemic, it felt like the writing acknowledged and validated those feelings in a therapeutic way, which was something I didn’t realize I needed. I didn’t foresee one minor theme being the rising facism and societal collapse we seem hostage to in the US at present. I connected strongly with that, and it made the novel feel prescient, like it had something important to say. This is viewed primarily through the lens of the healthcare system, which was a unique setting and appropriate vehicle. Because the narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian-American and his partner is from a Spanish-speaking country, they give us a rather rare dynamic that is multi-cultural, queer, uncosmopolitan—and refreshingly—not narrated from someone in their teens or twenties.

The claustrophobic, frenetic situation the main character finds himself in—having an aortic dissection and being abruptly healthy one minute and precariously bedridden the next—was portrayed well, punctuated by the narrator’s thoughts back to other moments of helplessness in his life. This felt so real, authentic, and deeply human. This is juxtaposed against the the tender relationship dynamic between the protagonist and his partner and the relationships he builds with those in his care team. In this way, the novel gives you a compelling take on how we can fall into hopelessness while being rescued by the warmth of those who genuinely care. That sense of hope threaded into the story makes examining the emotionally-frought topics at the heart of of the novel palatable, while giving the narrative depth.

I’ll also say hat’s-off to the author for skillfully and delicately capturing the dynamic between a patient and the healthcare workers caring for them. You get to see the narrator at one point sticking up for himself while feeling the guardedness (for legal reasons) of the healthcare team who is dealing with the repercussions of one nurse’s mistake while simultaneously trying to convey to the narrator that they are on his side. The tension of that moment was executed perfectly. He also brilliantly captured how healthcare workers were fighting the extra tax on the system from the virus while putting their own lives at risk while also dealing with the radical right saying they were making it all up. I work in healthcare and find it’s often portrayal in media in an overly-dramatized or poorly-researched manner. Greenwell, however, pulled it off.

One minor critique is that the style got into stream of consciousness, with the main character dissecting poems in his head several times. Though I enjoyed the majority of these, there was one which I had difficulty following as someone who doesn’t have an academic-level knowledge of poetry. It mildly took me out of the writing, but I also find it endearing when authors I like ramble about things they love. I cherish Greenwell’s literary style, and believe those who value prose testing artistic boundaries with structure, device, narrative, and themes will see this novel’s merits. Overall, it was a pleasure to read, with the writing having a depth and tenderness that drew me in. Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I requested and received an eARC of Small Rain by Garth Greenwell via NetGalley. As a fan of Greenwell’s other works, this was definitely a request that I was so happy to see approved, although I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The novel follows an unnamed poet who is struck suddenly, and alarmingly, ill. Confined to the ICU during the Covid pandemic, the narrator muses on life, art, health, and so much more. This is a very quiet, intimate novel, with a lot to say. It draws from small moments of recognition that spark memories, covering an expanse of feelings and experiences that may displace the reader in time, but never from the roots of the story.

Golly! I have to say, I’m in awe of what Greenwell was able to achieve in this novel. The text itself is broken into five, long chapters. The way he is able to capture the consciousness of his protagonist on the page is incredible. The prose creates an intimacy with the unnamed narrator that allows the reader to cycle through all of these complicated emotions with him as he contemplates life, death, love, decency, from a hospital bed. I could feel the tenderness between the narrator and L, those small acts of intimate kindness from those taking care of him. There were passages that made me feel anger on the narrator’s behalf followed by passages that made me feel remorse for the extremity of my feelings. The narrative effortlessly weaves into the past in these wonderfully long, winding sentences that sometimes leave you feeling disoriented, perfectly capturing the full range of emotion felt by the protagonist and that very particular, helpless feeling that comes with being ill and at the mercy of medical professionals who you don’t quite always understand.

We meet our narrator in a very specific moment of not only personal crisis, but also in a world fraught with political tension, during the height of the Covid pandemic. It’s very human and raw, honest about the ugliness of the world, while also honoring the beauty of life as well. Greenwell leaves no stone unturned, stretching five glorious chapters into something that felt remarkable. The novel covers a lot of ground thematically, but these ideas are all incorporated in a way that feels natural to the story and the narrator’s experience.

Garth Greenwell’s third novel (after “What Belongs to You” and “Cleanness”) and I understand – not having read the first two - feature the same narrator and while very much functioning as standalone novels can also be read as part of what the author calls an “unfolding project”.

The novel’s setting is Iowa, at the early height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The unnamed male narrator – a poet who teaches at the University together with his more senior Spanish-speaking partner L (also a poet) goes to hospital after suffering acute pain to be told that he has suffered a potentially life-threatening infrarenal aortic dissection – and that the hospital wants to find out the cause of the dissection so as to work out how to proceed.

It is strongly autobiographical in nature: Greenwell has said in a pre-publication interview that he “underwent a medical crisis similar to that of the narrator” – and that he wanted to “try to find a way in fiction to try and process that experience and to capture the minute-to-minute experience of being a patient”; and his partner is the poet Luis Muñoz, who runs the Spanish-language M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa.

And much of the novel is very much that minute to minute experience – one entirely unfamiliar to the narrator (and presumably Greenwell before his own hospitalisation) but one that will, at least in many respects, be depressingly familiar to even anyone who has sat with a loved one in hospital – with many of the procedures described in detail (ultrasound, X-Rays, ECG, EKG, IV lines) I think being fairly routine for anyone who has visited close relatives in hospital or themselves done similar tests either as part of an investigation or simply a medical.

But there is no question that Greenwell captures these procedures – their oddities, their indignities, the worry they can engender – brilliantly, as well as the more general sense of loss of agency and literally existential fear that accompanies an emergency admission to hospital particularly with an unclear but potentially hugely serious diagnosis. And all of this exacerbated by the lockdown restrictions so that the narrator is largely isolated from loved ones and having to face much of his ordeal alone – Ls rare visits an emotional highpoint of the book.

In many ways this is a book of minutiae: house repairs - on the house that the narrator and L buy and which turns out to be much more of a project than they had ever expected or could easily afford); weather – and in particular the experience of being in the direct path of a Derecho a few months earlier; tree surgery – in the aftermath of a huge oak part falling on their house in the storm; medicine regimes – once the narrator is preparing to go home; and even dog parks – in the novel’s closing scene: all of this are described in painstaking detail to the extent that I did sometimes find myself slightly glossing over the detail or panning the text for its literary nuggets.

The effect I felt was rather like an Ian McEwan novel although with the excessive detail being based on exploring lived experience rather than reproducing research.

Where the book really excelled for me was when the narrator was in a more contemplative mood – either re-examining his life in the light of what has happened,

Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace. Remember this, I said to myself. Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn’t the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this.

Or even more interestingly reverting to the poetry he has loved, analyses and taught as a way to come to terms with his predicament. At times perhaps it can feel rather pedological (and I have seen implications that Greenwell has shoe-horned in some of his previous blog writing on his favourite poems) but his careful and patient examination of George Oppen’s “Stranger’s Child” really enhanced my appreciation.

His assertion that “Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.” permeates the book.

Overall, this was an impressive book.

There is beauty in simplicity. Greenwell is an author adept at accurately rendering the mundane and quotidian aspects of life with complexity, quiet polish, and grace.

This is my favorite work of Garth Greenwell's. I believe it to be most accessible, but also the most potentially triggering, with its talk of the pandemic and police brutality, events from our recent past that are ever present, no matter how often we talk about them in the past tense. In its way it's also a love letter to the doctors and nurses that put themselves in harm's way daily, going to work to save lives while endangering their own.

I lost myself in the passages where the unnamed narrator analyzes poetry from his hospital bed. I've never had the patience for it, but as a person who finds such beauty in language, I was spellbound.

Greenwell often writes in long paragraphs, with sentences that stretch on and on. If you're someone who luxuriates in frequent paragraph breaks and stopping points, Greenwell's style propels you on, forcing you to keep your eyes on your page and off your smartphones and computer screens. No, not much "happens" in this novel, but ideas can be illuminated in the absence of plot points. It's in the in-between, the ruminations on a life from the proximity to death, where beauty is found.

I really, really wanted to love this book. What Belongs to You is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I think Garth Greenwell is just one of the most brilliant, generous, and compassionate writers working alive. I have a copy of What Belongs to You besides my desk as I write--it's that beloved and crucial for me.

That said, I was underwhelmed by this book 😭. I wonder if it's because it's a covid novel, but the covid / hospital descriptions were both excruciatingly detailed and not particularly interesting, and took up a lot of this book, and the quality of language just didn't feel as considered. The relationship with the narrator's partner, L, however, is a highlight, as well as the meditations upon the past.

Small Rain is a very lyrical and poetic story, and Garth Greenwell’s writing is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When I started reading, I immediately immersed myself in this stunning prose. However, I only rated the story three stars instead of a beautiful four or even glorious five stars.

My three star rating has to do with two things. First of all, even though I loved the writing and didn’t mind the lack of quotation marks, somehow, I didn’t feel connected to our main character and his partner, L., as much as I wanted to. This might be because I didn’t have full names to connect to the characters. Furthermore, Covid was present in the story. Until now, I’ve read about five stories with Covid in them, and I only loved one. Somehow, my mind doesn’t want to read about Covid yet.

If you don’t mind the issues I had and love an exquisitely written book, then this might be a great one for you!

Thank you, Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, for this ARC.

When an otherwise healthy poet comes down with a mysterious illness, he is admitted into the hospital—where the staff are equally mesmerized by his strange sickness, and he descends into a stream of consciousness about his life before and after the tragic incident.

Garth’s writing is always terrific, and I found myself highlighting phrases more often than not, which is something I always love about literary fiction. He truly captures the bustle of being hospitalized, and the vaguely unsettling transience of that experience (and all the people you meet along the way).

Overall, this is quite a departure for Garth. In WHAT BELONGS TO YOU and CLEANNESS, I became drawn into those tragic love stories and the dark, Eastern European backdrop. This, however, takes place in the Midwest and isn’t tonally about that at all—there are peeps from the poet’s partner, but they’re mainly kind displays of affection, and he is by no means the focal point of the story. Also, I felt that the stream of consciousness writing style didn’t totally work for me, as the book didn't take me on a narrative journey in the way I hoped it would. If you are a fan of Garth’s writing and thoughtful reflections, absolutely read this one—but I’d pick up his earlier books first if you haven’t taken a look already!

Garth Greenwell is one of the best prose writers working today, and SMALL RAIN only further cements him as one of contemporary's greats. In his latest offering, we find our narrator living in Iowa, confined to an ER room during early-Covid. This is a departure from his previous two novels in many senses, our narrator is no longer abroad, and the casual sex of those two earlier books has been replaced by his first efforts into domesticity. Though Greenwell's prose style remains the same, and he can spend many pages circling the same subject/memory/etc. And it's exciting to see him work at this new juncture, and I look forward to seeing where he goes next.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.