Small Rainis out September 3 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
On a muggy July afternoon in Iowa City, I went grocery shopping with the writer Garth Greenwell.
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.
Good fresh lettuce … hmmm.
Will you help me pick a good fresh lettuce?
he asked, peering at the handwritten list.
A couple of tomatoes.
Oh my gosh, Im so glad youre here.
It has been a startling experience for him, even at a very low dose.
He is suffering from a progressive tear in his aortic wall that has brought him close to death.
The narrator is cared for by a coterie of nurses who range from professional and devoted to dangerously incompetent.
His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a online grid of veins.
But theyre inevitable, the little cruelties of intimate life.
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 gymnasts force.
What it means to be alive, choosing, observing and wanting, wanting, wanting.
In person, hes tall with a delicate, dreamy face.
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.
Im so interested if she was aware of making room for clearly this sissy boy on the farm.
After a period at SUNY-Purchase, earning an M.F.A.
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.
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.
In 2020, he suffered the aortic tear.
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 dont have a tenured job.
Im hustling all the time.
And so even when things are going well, you still really feel how contingent everything is.
Greenwell contends that his books, includingSmall Rain,are fiction.
The book is a novel.
Its very clear to me that its a novel, he said.
It is in no way a transcription of my own experience.
Its not a memoir; its full of invention.
He eschews the termautofictionin general.
And about half an inch above this, we read the words for Luis Munoz.
Munoz 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 espanola.
Today was an English day.
I prefer not to read it until it is set, he said warmly.
He turned to his partner and said, proudly, Youre making literature.
A literature from our lives.
In ones 20s and even 30s, one can imagine countless possibilities for the future.
For most people, these narrow with age.
The narrator, at times, feels constrained by, even resentful of, this reality.
But right at the beginning of the book, the narrator is struck down.
Hes confined to a hospital bed, unsure if hell 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.
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 ones face to everything.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
