Garth Greenwell’s Grand Romance

On a muggy July afternoon in Iowa City, I went grocery shopping with the writer Garth Greenwell. We hit up the town’s 1971-founded co-op armed with a short list from his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz. I was going over for dinner the next day, and ingredients needed to be acquired.

Greenwell is one of the more respected practitioners of American fiction working today. His first novel, What Belongs to You, the story of a love affair between a young Bulgarian hustler and an expat teacher from Kentucky, was nominated for the 2016 National Book Award and will be adapted as an opera this fall. His second novel, Cleanness, mines the same American-in-Sofia premise to create a deeper, more layered work. Cleanness is full of sex and feeling, painstakingly unfolding the desire and alienation that underpin one gay man’s life; it was widely celebrated by critics and a finalist for multiple awards.

But on this day’s errand, in the New Pioneer produce aisle, Greenwell could be mistaken for someone a little more quotidian: an obliging, slightly flustered midwestern husband. “‘Good fresh lettuce’ … hmmm. Will you help me pick a good fresh lettuce?” he asked, peering at the handwritten list. “A couple of tomatoes. Yellow and red. That’s perfect. Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you’re here.”

In their household, Muñoz does more of the cooking, while Greenwell often shops and cleans, an arrangement with roots in one of their early dates 11 years ago, when Greenwell showed up at Muñoz’s apartment and found him pressing the water out of tofu with heavy books of poetry. As we wandered the aisles like pilgrims in search of potato bread, Greenwell told me that his doctor had recently put him on Zepbound, “one of these weight-loss drugs,” for the sake of his health. It has been a startling experience for him, even at a very low dose. “I’ve always had a difficult relationship with food,” he said, “and it just totally shuts down what they call food noise, food anxiety.”

The complications of desire and the mysteries of the body are at the heart of Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, his warmest and most accomplished work yet. It begins with an unnamed poet living in Iowa City who suddenly experiences a terrifying and consuming bodily malfunction, a pain that “defies description” and sends him to the ER. He is suffering from a progressive tear in his aortic wall that has brought him close to death. This event, inspired by a similar crisis in Greenwell’s life during the summer of 2020, makes the narrator a medical mystery to the staff of this midsize midwestern hospital.

The narrator is cared for by a coterie of nurses who range from professional and devoted to dangerously incompetent. He FaceTimes and visits with his partner of seven years, L. The narrator fights for his quality of care, reflects on his family and American precarity during the George Floyd protests, and, in one pages-long, audacious, likely divisive flex of a passage, teaches the reader a poem by George Oppen.

Throughout Small Rain, Greenwell’s massing, vascular prose, arranged in paragraphs that span many pages, deftly forces the reader to slow down and concentrate. His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a network of veins. When reading them, I felt as though I were traveling in a car along a road, taking in new landscapes alien to my life and often noticing with fresh eyes my own reflection in the windowpane:

I promised myself I would never make L cry again. But they’re inevitable, the little cruelties of intimate life. L had been guilty too, maybe not of cruelty but of thoughtlessness, dismissiveness, he could be exasperating, he had hurt me too; so that the key to a long life with another, the key that kept it from being a prison, wasn’t devotion, which I had a talent for, but forgiveness, which was something I had to learn.

Greenwell operates in an aesthetic tradition: the novel of consciousness. The way longing slides into us like a blade. The worry that the flame of horniness will gutter in us with age. How long-buried memory vaults up within us with a gymnast’s force. What it means to be alive, choosing, observing — and wanting, wanting, wanting. This is Greenwell’s great gift: finding forms for the representation of thought, much as the Impressionist painters, more than a century ago, found new forms for the representation of light.

Hours before grocery shopping, I talked with Greenwell in Prairie Lights, Iowa City’s venerable indie bookstore and café. In person, he’s tall with a delicate, dreamy face. He wore a blue chambray shirt, black New Balances (chosen by Muñoz), and an Apple Watch (chosen by his doctor to monitor potential heart arrhythmias). Over his lip is the pale trace of a scar, the relic of a bad bike accident when he was 11.

Greenwell was born in 1978 in Louisville, Kentucky, one generation removed from the tobacco farm on his mother’s side. He remembers his father, a lawyer, wanted his children to be visibly middle class and worked to discipline any note of a country accent and any hint of nonnormativity out of them. From when he was quite young, Greenwell knew that he was gay; the masculinity embodied by men like his father did not feel accessible to him. He remembers spending time on the farm with his great-grandmother. She was an “incredible Kentucky woman,” he said, “born in 1898. She taught me to crochet. I spent hours sitting with her crocheting. I’m so interested if she was aware of making room for — clearly this sissy boy — on the farm.”

Once a poor student with a string of C’s and D’s on his report cards, he had a transformative experience in high school when he joined the choir and discovered a talent for singing. He gained admission to Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and later studied vocal performance at Eastman School of Music in Rochester. While at Eastman, he developed a passion for poetry, which, coupled with dissatisfaction over what he was able to do musically, led him to change course. After a period at SUNY-Purchase, earning an M.F.A. in poetry in St. Louis, and beginning a Ph.D. in English literature at Harvard, he decided he could try to be a scholar or an artist, not both.

He chose artist, but making the decision did not set up some kind of instant, lepidopterous transformation. He was in his late 20s, in debt, and struggling with his health. “I weighed 365 pounds and had become so estranged from my body,” Greenwell recounted. He began to work with a personal trainer, which did not help with the debt. It was time to leave Boston.

He did, teaching English at Greenhills, an independent prep school in Ann Arbor, where he worked for three years. In 2009, he moved to Bulgaria. He taught English there and began to write prose. In 2013, he left Bulgaria to study fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Placid, literary Iowa City — with stints in other places, most recently New York — has been his home base ever since.

In 2020, he suffered the aortic tear. He wasn’t in the hospital for as long as Small Rain’s narrator is, but the experience did give him a sense of urgency around making work: “I remember in the hospital feeling like my experience was so vague and shapeless. There was nothing to hold on to. It offered none of the satisfactions of narrative.” He knew he wanted to write more. “Three books in, my experience of my life is still sometimes one of precarity,” Greenwell said. “I don’t have a tenured job. I’m hustling all the time. And so even when things are going well, you still really feel how contingent everything is.”

Because his subject matter loosely follows his own life, some people have read his novels as naked autobiography, a variant on memoir with sexier sentences and plausible deniability. Greenwell contends that his books, including Small Rain, are fiction. “The book is a novel. It’s very clear to me that it’s a novel,” he said. “It is in no way a transcription of my own experience. It’s not a memoir; it’s full of invention.” He eschews the term autofiction in general. “I just don’t think it has meaning,” Greenwell said, quipping that the contemporary cultural tendency to conflate writers’ lives and their novels is like seeing a barrel of oil and an oil painting as the same. “What it’s describing to me seems to be just the oldest game in literature, which is how invention and the found material of experience or reality interact in art.”

The novel’s epigraph is a line from Elizabeth Bowen: “To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.” And about half an inch above this, we read the words “for Luis Muñoz.”

Muñoz is as compact as Greenwell is stately, radiating a soft and easy warmth. He has published ten books of poetry, runs the Spanish-language M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, and makes a mean tortilla española. As the narrator in Small Rain does with his fictional partner, Greenwell and Muñoz alternate speaking in English and Spanish at home each day.

Today was an English day. In their spacious white Dutch Colonial, we ate tofu curry with leeks, tortilla, and a salad of red and yellow tomatoes.

I asked Muñoz if he had read drafts of Small Rain, given that parts of it are inspired by their lives together. Greenwell had offered to let him read the manuscript and give him feedback before he sent it to his editor, but Muñoz demurred. “I prefer not to read it until it is set,” he said warmly. He turned to his partner and said, proudly, “You’re making literature. A literature from our lives.” He wanted Greenwell to write his fiction unimpeded, to have the freedom to invent and borrow from life alike.

In key moments, Small Rain touches upon its narrator’s wrestling with the circumstances of his life, including his long-term relationship in a small midwestern city. In one’s 20s and even 30s, one can imagine countless possibilities for the future. For most people, these narrow with age. Life shrinks. The narrator, at times, feels constrained by, even resentful of, this reality. “It had been some time since we’d had sex, some time before I went into the hospital, I mean; what happened to most couples had happened to us, sex had become an event, something remarkable.”

But right at the beginning of the book, the narrator is struck down. He’s confined to a hospital bed, unsure if he’ll ever leave it. In a paradoxical way, having the world taken from him delivers it to him. By committing to the particularity of his life, he finds a new expansiveness of existence. And his body-threatening, life-changing calamity, as the pages of Small Rain turn, ultimately becomes a deep, transformative gift.

Where his first two books take Bulgaria as backdrop and a certain kind of soft-skinned, deeply feeling libertinism as narrative vehicle, Small Rain functions as a midlife sequel, one that is quietly, unabashedly romantic. If the banquet of eroticism in Cleanness caused me to on occasion hold my breath, Small Rain’s single sex scene made me wipe my eyes. Its enclosed and high-stakes choice of settings and situations — the ER and ICU during the height of COVID, the hard-won house and loving life partner, the glancing brush with death — grant the novel a blazing universality and grace.

“In a way, the entire book is a message to my partner,” Greenwell said softly. “It says something about my whole approach to art, which is this hyperdevotion to the particular. Which is a way of turning toward the biggest questions we can ask about human life. To have turned from the world to a single face is to turn one’s face to everything.”