Small Rain

Sarah Moroz interviews novelist and poet Garth Greenwell about his last novel Small Rain, out now from Macmillan. Daisy and Walden are back with another round of links.

Nothing confirms the veracity of Maslow’s pyramid like falling ill and having one’s health safety evaporate. In Garth Greenwell’s latest novel, Small Rain, illness strikes suddenly and irreversibly, sending our narrator to the hospital at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Inspired by a real personal experience, Greenwell nonetheless “watched a lot of YouTube videos” to precisely capture the details of the care his narrator receives. “When I wanted to describe a procedure, I would watch nursing training videos as a way to be able to enter into that step-by-step process,” he told me.

Greenwell’s fastidious writing—on display ever since the beautiful What Belongs to You and Cleanness—here branches from the terror of living in an imperiled body to the ambivalent realities of his life outside the hospital walls: becoming a first-time home owner (“I started to feel like a character in a nineteenth-century novel, ruined by living above his means”), sharing a bilingual domestic life with his Spanish partner (“he tried to pronounce the difference between sheet and shit, impossible for him to hear”), and bristling against middle-aged adulthood (“my approach to a problem was often to wallow in it, I didn’t want to solve it all at once, I wanted to think about it, to formulate it in various ways”). 

I spoke to Greenwell over Zoom; we discussed squeamishness, the slim but meaningful potential for personal change, and why he’s absolutely never going to start meditating.

Sarah Moroz: The body as a mechanism is really brought to the fore while the narrator is in the hospital—but there's also a lot about body shame and body horror that evolves over the course of the book. Towards the end, there's this refrain that I thought was so gentle and lovely, where he says, coaxingly: “poor body”—almost the way you’d talk to a child. The body has been this “grotesquerie,” and yet, there's this sense of forgiveness. How did you evolve the narrator’s relationship to an embodied self?

Garth Greenwell: I think it responds to something that is really at the heart of the book. He’s someone in his early 40s whose life has been attached, in the past, to an idea of his life as ‘adventure’—geographical adventures, since he’s lived abroad, erotic adventures, since he's always been invested in a promiscuous, sexual way of being. And now he's seven years into a long-term relationship. He's living in the American heartland. In lots of ways, that seems like the opposite of adventure. I think he has become estranged from his life; I think he has come to resent it a little bit. In middle life, there's a sense that you're not going to turn around and be an astronaut, you know? Like you're not going to make radical changes. Your life has solidified around you. And there's something in that that is a kind of an affront to our sense of freedom—the very commitments we make that allow our lives to be meaningful are, by their very nature, limitations on our freedom. 

He has also stopped seeing his life in its full vividness; he has become dulled to his day-to-day existence, which, again, is something that I think happens to most of us. I think his body is part of that reality. I mean, he has always hated his body. He has always taken it for granted. When he has thought about it at all, it’s as an antagonist, and at the beginning of this book, he gets struck down by this annihilating pain. That pain and that illness, they take away the world from him. He's confined to this bed. Certainly in the first days that he's in the ICU, there's a real possibility he's going to die, and in this paradoxical way, in taking his life away from him, this experience delivers his life back to him, and delivers the world back to him. He's shocked into an awareness of his life as accommodating of wonder. 

During this experience, he looks at his body in a very detailed way, just describing his body. That was one of the really difficult things I've written. He confronts this immense shame he has about his particular body, and maybe the fact of embodiment itself, the fact that he can't be a sort of body-less spirit or mind. But also, as you say, he sees his body as this suffering creature. He realizes that his body is there not just to be hated and not just to be resented, but that, even if this remains impossible for him, it is actually, possibly, there to be loved. 

Interview continues below

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SM: I want to poke at this idea of domesticity as an adventure. There's this line towards the end where the narrator says, “no tie had ever really anchored me. Even now, even this beautiful house, this table, even L, I might slip free of all of it, maybe there was something in me that wanted to slip free.” I thought that was very provocative, because there's so much romance in the book, and the relationship is lively and caring, and at the same time, there’s something in him that can't quite conform to it. No matter how good things are, there's something… itchy.

GG: I mean, that is part of the adventure. We can only really value something if we can acknowledge the possibility of its loss. This is not a narrator who feels like Ah, I've found my place. I'm perfectly satisfied by my existence. He's always imagining that other people do feel that—but maybe they don't, you know? Maybe, actually, we all sort of feel like, Is this really right? I’m a big fan of these kinds of contrary desires, trying to find a way to think about the self that's big enough to encompass contradiction—as opposed to repression. That, to me, is just a path to disaster. 

What interests me is to say real commitment is coexisting with this sense that maybe tomorrow everything's going to fall away. In all three books, the narrator finds meaning in a lot of things. In some sense, I think of this book as almost having an aria recitative structure, a way that he's able to look at anything and spin up little dust clouds of meaning. I try to even poke fun at this in that last section, when he has a little aria about a potato chip, which is so ridiculous—and even he says it's so ridiculous, he calls it the transubstantiation of a root vegetable, and that makes him laugh. 

At the same time, I think he feels that he is always on a precipice, and half a step in one direction is this fullness of meaning, and half a step in the other direction is an abyss of absolute nihilism and the absence of all meaning. And he's really balanced on that. This is a book that I think does finally step into that sense of fullness, having been threatened with real nihilism, real nothingness, the nothingness of his own mortality. It really scares me, but I know that at some point I need to write the book that goes in the other direction, that fully honors this other side of him that is really bent toward negation. I don't know what the story will be, but I know that in the future, it’s something that I have to write.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Brat Summer → Mount Eerie Autumn (Spotify)

• “this is, like, LITERALLY exactly 50% DOSS and 50% Two Shell” — @GRRLmusic (Soundcloud)

• Hattie Lindert eviscerates The Dare’s What’s Wrong With New York? (Resident Advisor)

• A pan double-feature: this one on Sean McNamara’s Reagan biopic that feels like it literally came out of nowhere (Slate)

• The business of Business of Fashion (Columbia Journalism Review)

• Realizing how many of the art bots I follow were Brazilian…I may never fully recover (X)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• It’s In Search Of Lost Time but every sentence ends with “lol.” That’s it. That’s the tweet. (Google Drive)

• Vivian Medithi interviews Lauren Cook about Sex Goblin, which we excerpted in Dirt earlier this year (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• “In the water, said Miller, ‘I see portals.’” Omnia Saed writes about the divers researching the Trans-Atlantic slave trade by excavating sunken ships (Atmos)

• “We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogues” (Inc.)

• Katie Chiou and Maya Man hold a state-of-the-girl-internet forum (Archetype)

• A near-perfect essay and defense of the indefensible: jam bands (The Abridged Abyss)

• Did you catch Walden on NPR talking Worst songs ever? Listen online here (NPR)

• *taps sign* (The Washington Post)