I have no idea why I have not read American author Garth Greenwell up to now. I’ve been interested enough to buy his two previous novels as soon as they came out in paperback but they are still unread on my shelves. With this new title being one of the highlights of Picador Book’s Autumn release schedule in the UK I thought this was a good place to start. I’m so glad I did.
Reading a brief synopsis I wasn’t sure how this would appeal to me. A man in his forties gets suddenly seriously ill of something other than Covid at the time of the pandemic. Much of this book is his experience in hospital. Latent hypochondria and general medical squeamishness would suggest this book is not the best match for me, but I was drawn in right from the outset and it never loosened its grip. It’s meticulously detailed, in fact, it’s hard to believe it’s a novel. I don’t know whether the author has experienced anything similar but this level of observation certainly makes it feel autobiographical, although I’m not sure that many of us, in the character’s situation would be able to focus so closely on the procedures carried out and the care he is receiving. In his hospital bed he becomes increasingly insular- only one daily visitor for a short period and there is little to do than focus on his health. There is a distinct Proustian feel as events trigger things from his life before his health emergency and as the novel progresses we get to know more about him in a way which feels totally convincing.
There’s a strong literary and poetic feel to this work. Both the main character and his partner, referred only to as L, are poets and some of the digressions away from the medical involve the work of poets which got a little technical for me in places but fits in well with the work as a whole.
I think that this is one of those books that will linger on (I think if at any time in the future, should I have a medical procedure, or God forbid, a hospital stay, it will certainly come back to mind). It is life-affirming and full of hope, even when situations seem terrifying or desperate. It also underlines again, just how difficult things were during that strange period. It will reward re-reading.
All in all, a book I thought I might struggle with from a bare description and its setting has proved to be a tremendous reading experience and will certainly encourage me to get those two other novels by this author off my shelves as soon as possible.

In Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s unnamed narrator recounts the beginning of his illness and treatment in hospital in Iowa during the pandemic, drip-feeding biography as he goes. That may not sound appealing but it is: I read the first (longish) chapter in one go, one breath almost. Small episodes in the hospital narrative act as well-timed springboards to reminiscences of past events.
Despite the 2020 setting, this isn’t a pandemic-heavy novel (his illness is not Covid-related): it’s referenced with a light touch and to provide a contrast to, and yearning for, earlier times. The close-up view of the workings of the hospital, though, is compelling. There are such differences in approach by the nurses: some are all brisk efficiency, others, notably Alivia, taking the time to explain the routines and oddities of life in the ICU. No matter how good the medical knowledge and facilities are, it’s bedside manner and kindness that make the difference.
Small Rain also contains meditation on poetry, the natural world, love and family; there is a beautiful analysis of a poem. It’s perfectly timed; we learn almost nothing of his mother until he finally lets her know he’s ill. One of the things I love about fiction is the opportunity to experience a different slice of life. Ostensibly I have almost nothing in common with the narrator but I was happy to spend time with him and you might be too.

Small Rain is a beautiful and quiet novel about one man’s sudden critical illness and subsequent hospital stay. This takes place during the early-ish days of Covid so if that’s something you’d rather not read about I’d maybe skip this one for now? I did not find it reduced my enjoyment at all.

The unnamed narrator admits himself to hospital with wrenching pain & quickly becomes an exciting patient to the staff due to his rare illness. During his stay he ruminates on his life with his partner L as well as the poetry & art that is so central to his being.

I thought this was utterly gorgeous. The highlight for me was the relationship between the narrator and L. The love they have for each other could be felt through the pages. Obviously this is a heavy topic but it never tipped into the macabre. Wonderfully done and what an introduction to Greenwell’s work for me!

A writer’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain that brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU.

An absolutely incredible, thought-provoking work covering themes like health, death, love and so much more. The writing was so captivating and there were so many interesting stylistic choices that kept me so hooked all throughout the story. I feel like it lost me a little in the second half, but I still enjoyed a lot overall. It captured and brought out so many emotions, and it will definitely stick with me for a while.

Many thanks to Pan Macmillan & NetGalley for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

This stands out from almost everything I have read. I doesn’t read like a novel and yet i can’t quite put my finger on why. This gripped me in so many ways, and brought of ALL the feelings in ways I just wasn’t expecting or ready for. This should be on any book lovers radar. Just wow.
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Thanks to the publisher for the early copy!!

I am quite speechless after finishing this book. It might’ve been one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a while. Small rain is a simple story following a middle aged man over several days during a sudden medical crisis. We’re thrown into the chaos of pain, long ER wait, hospital stay and uncertain diagnosis as experienced by the narrator. It’s not only an incredibly detailed depiction of what happens to a patient showing up to ER and a few hours later landing in an ICU but most importantly the human reaction to it. The depiction of fear, uncertainty, loneliness and facing one’s mortality is really intimate making it easy to empathise with. The events are taking place during the second wave of Covid in the US and Small Rain might be one of the better books written about that era of the pandemic. It’s not trying to judge it, it just adds a bit more nuance to the terrifying nature of the health event and the loneliness experienced by the narrator. The structure of the book beautifully follows his state of mind, dipping in and out of pain meds haze, from absolute awareness of the surroundings to recollecting special memories or past events. It is a book that feels very human, there is so much vulnerability, the simple beauty of human interactions based around care and kindness. The longer the narrator stays in the hospital in a still very uncertain situation the more he retreats into his memories and meditations on art and poetry which reveals to us more about his past and his relationships. But with all of that the novel is quite fast paced since the reason for this health event is unknown so the treatment plan is unfolding as the doctors are scrambling to find the cause. I have thoroughly enjoyed this read and it will definitely land as one of my favourite books of this year. A little cherry on top was the ending scene which involved dogs and it was also one of the most beautiful descriptions of a human-dog interaction I’ve read in a book. It just couldn’t end better.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the eARC!

Firstly, the company must be congratulated on this cover art. Not my cup of tea otherwise unfortunately.

🌧️ REVIEW 🌧️

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Release date: 19th September

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

📝 - A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

💭 - As you can tell by the rating, I adored this one. The writing style was brilliant, almost like a stream of consciousness as the protagonist spends his time in hospital, processing what is happening, as well as reflecting back on important things in his life. I felt like I could relate so much to the thought processes going on, and they were so much like how I’d feel in his situation, it just felt so raw and candid. This is one of those books that reminded me quite why I love reading so much. Really brilliant, I’ll be looking up Greenwell’s previous works for sure. Highly recommend you keep your eye out for this one in a few weeks time…

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Although Greenwell’s exceptionally-accomplished novel has autobiographical underpinnings, he’s adamant it be regarded as fiction, not autofiction – a genre he views as suspect perhaps because, for him, it blurs the boundaries between personal experience and the transfiguration of experience through art. Greenwell’s story's narrated by an unnamed man in the throes of a medical emergency, heralded by sudden, previously-unimaginable pain. But this emergency’s unfolding in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and the narrator’s more concerned with avoiding overflowing hospitals than seeking treatment. But when it’s clear this pain’s not going away, he’s forced to act. After hours in a dingy, crowded emergency room, it transpires the narrator’s aorta’s so damaged it’s a miracle he’s still alive, let alone still standing. But the explanation for his condition eludes him and his doctors. He’s an enigma that gives him near-celebrity status for the team of professionals rushing to his bedside.

And so, the narrator’s transplanted from the world of the living into a liminal space, the otherworldly realm of the sick. The pandemic means hospital visitors are restricted, so human contact’s primarily with medical staff: the outside’s only glimpsed through windows, so that a sighting of a sparrow perched near his window becomes something marvellous. Isolation stirs a series of reflections: some based in memory, others in thoughts about a self the narrator can no longer take for granted. Outside, he’s a poet slowly building a reputation in literary circles, a southerner now living in Iowa City. A choice founded in his relationship with fellow poet L. who teaches there – L.’s character mirrors aspects of Greenwell’s own partner, poet Luis Muñoz. The bond between narrator and L., albeit shifting from earlier passion to comfortable domesticity, highlights the strangeness of being assigned a new identity as patient rather than person; subjected to intimate acts ‘stripped of intimacy,’ scrutinised, handled and assessed by a succession of strangers. Strangers in turn evaluated by the narrator: those who might provisionally act as friends; those who appear caring; those who seem closer to callous. All underlining the narrator’s incredible vulnerability: reduced to a mass of arteries, organs, and limbs that operate as junctions between his body and the machinery he now needs to function.

The narrator’s time’s punctuated by hospital routines and procedures with brief intervals created by L.’s daily visits. As time passes, the narrator retreats into meditations on the art and literature important to him. Small incidents set off fertile chains of association, as his doctors mentally dissect and parse his body, the narrator parses and dissects his favourite poems – the incomprehensible language of medicine countered by the known of literature. Two separate realms which first clash then slowly intersect - unlike the ongoing clashes between hospitals battling Covid and swathes of American society refusing to admit to its existence. A situation that angers and baffles the narrator whose analysis of his situation mingles with concerns about his society, a culture of distinctly ‘American unreason.’ The sense of being undone by his body parallels impressions of America as a ‘coming-apart country’ rife with conflict and falsities: racist policing; climate denial in the face of ongoing ecological devastation. So that Greenwell’s remarkably-convincing portrait of a body in crisis broadens into a compelling examination of contemporary America’s ills.

Although the narrator here clearly connects to the ones featured in Greenwell’s earlier novels, this works perfectly as a standalone piece. Greenwell’s influences are wide-ranging drawing on the so-called literature of illness including Virginia Woolf’s discussions of living with pain. For me there were echoes too of Mark Doty, Anne Boyer’s writings on cancer and capitalism, and Denton Welch grappling with hospitalisation after a catastrophic accident. Greenwell’s prose is disciplined, measured yet strangely hypnotic – as is his meticulously detailed account of his narrator’s medical treatments. But this is also a book about what might console and sustain in the face of overwhelming precarity: tenderness, the recognition, acceptance, and celebration of love. Greenwell’s dubbed it as above all a message to his partner Luis. Yet Greenwell’s narrative steers admirably clear of sentimentality, it’s fluid, gripping, relatable and, in its early stages, sometimes close to unbearably tense.

I've read all of Garth Greenwell's novels, and this one has to be the most accomplished yet. By a strange coincidence, since the narrator of Greenwell's novel suffers from an arterial rupture of unknown cause, the novel is best read alongside Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, an ethnography of atherosclerosis. In Greenwell's case, the body multiple is also enacted through a series of references to art, poetry, music-the poet's body is constituted by his memories and experiences as well as by medical, nursing, and pharmacological practices. And also by care (Mol's The logic of care can again be a companion text). The novel offers a detailed phenomenology not only of the (multiple) body in pain (another companion: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World), but also of the infrastructures of care, whom they support and and how. On a very personal level, while I'm terrible at reading poetry, those few pages on Oppen almost convinced me to give it another chance.

Profound story about a poet who unexpectedly faces his own mortality. This was the first book I read by this author and found his writing style unusual. The story very readable, often viscerally uncomfortable and sometimes frightening, so it hit the mark. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

This was a tense read at times, the narrator's experience of sudden pain and weeks spent in hospital as the doctors tried to find a reason for his symptoms was harrowing. His vulnerability as he relied on the medical staff for every aspect of his life was actually quite terrifying.
Beautifully written, I enjoyed the parts about his illness, his relationship with his partner and his family, but I found I was skimming over some of the other parts of the book which I didn't find so interesting.
I did enjoy most of this book but it wasn't something which held my interest at all times.

This was a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fascinating and raw account of what it was like to be admitted to hospital during Covid times, this account is based upon something that Greenwell went through in his life however as said by the author himself, it is a piece of fiction.

The writing was a little challenging in that there were no speech marks and quite often I would be faced with a wall of text when I turned the page making it slightly easier for me to skim read at times. This is what - for me - stops it being a 5 star read.

However despite this the story was fascinating and gripping, it was interesting to see this from a patient’s point of view as I am often on the other side of situations like this.
I enjoyed the poignancy that he saw human life with, the appreciation that came from a kind word or a gentle touch and the difference that it made to his relationship after going through something traumatic and life-altering.

The descriptions of the house development were interestingly spaced out, almost as though they were being used as a metaphor for his health: the damaged parts that needed almost entirely replaced while he was at the beginning of his hospital journey, the disastrous tree incident when the pain returned, the not quite perfect but patched up house when he finally got home after a prolonged hospital stay. I hope that this was intentional and knowing Greenwell’s writing, I imagine it was.

Enjoyably but difficult to read when he strayed off the subject. Read another poets novel and found it difficult to read as well, maybe it's the change in writing.

GARTH GREENWELL – SMALL RAIN ****

Garth Greenwell is a distinguished writer. He’s also, in my opinion, not easy to read.

Such is the detail in this story that either it is autobiographic, or he has had the best medical advice known to man. The details are astounding, every needle or pill or x ray is described in minute detail. It follows, without separate lines or quotation marks for dialogue, the extensive stay in hospital for the gay male protagonist as doctors and nurses discover what is wrong. And that’s it. With a few asides to life outside the four walls of his room. You are there. You might as well be the protagonist yourself.

The amazing thing is that something so potentially boring, a man going through tests for an unknown illness having been rushed to A&E, can be so absorbing. You have to keep reading. You have to find out what’s wrong and why. You need to read it for yourself.

<i>"What a little time it takes to part us from the life we knew."</i>

This will definitely be one of my top reads of the year. It's a book about ILLNESS and DEATH, and mainly takes place in the narrator's head. But I could NOT put it down. I loved all the <i>Magic Mountain</i> vibes of being like, oh my God, I am just a body, I am just a piece of meat. The data of the body collected by the hospital vs the abstract poetry the narrator has spent his life studying/teaching. And yet it is an incredibly uplifing, hopeful, and spiritaul read. A very impressive achievement.

I'm sometimes wary about books that read like they're just a transcription of the author's personal experience. You could VERY, VERY easily read this novel as a collection of Garth Greenwell's thoughts and reflections. Yiyun Li's <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/02/the-particles-of-order-fiction-yiyun-li">recent story in the New Yorker</a>is a good counterpoint of an author using FICTION and FICTIONAL TECHNIQUES to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/yiyun-li-09-02-24">write about a very difficult personal experience</a> rather than, like, memoir-ish techniques (i.e. conflation between narrator and writer).

So for me it was hard not to read this particular novel as a conflation/transcription (i.e. this is a book about what happened to me). But one of the themes in the book is WHAT IS THE POINT OF ART and WHAT CAN ART HELP US WITH, WHAT CAN ART DO. I was SO down with these passages. Oh my God, I was so moved! Yes, I am 100% the main audience for these kinds of reflections but so what!!

I also thought the technique of the book (the run-on sentences) and the shift between memory and present-tense in the hospital was expertly handled. You can really tell that Greenwell's training as a poet has trained him incredibly well in terms of being attentive to the energy of the language on the page. His background as a poet also serves him well in terms of another theme of the book that I loved - the importance of paying a particular kind of attention, to small unremarkable moments. Yes!!! This is achieved most memorably in a close reading of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=97&issue=2&page=21">this poem</a>, which was my favourite part of the whole book (it's worth reading the whole novel, I'd say, for this passage alone). It is SUCH a refreshing antidote to fucking TikTok ADHD consumer culture!!!

I loved the book's focus on the theme of love and happiness. I also loved the scene between him and the house contractor and how this leads to a reflection on the importance of 'loving your neighbour' - <i>"that's more important to me now than the purity of my life, than living with absolute integrity."</i>

I would strongly recommend this book to any fan of literary fiction and anyone who's working in the humanities/arts sector.

Quotes about the value/point of art that I loved:

<i>"The song articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that too, it created something; it didn't just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn't have felt before. It humanised me, I want to say."

"All art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there's a kind of sense only nonsense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible. It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel; it had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once."

"The only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core - though they were necessary to me, I thought, no matter how sick I might be they were still necessary to me."

"It's also why we need poems, I think: they exist in a different relationship to attention and to time; it's impossible for harried students worrying about their exams, for harried readers checking their phones, to see and feel what's happening in them. 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... Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence."</i>

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

The haunting and haunted story of a poet's journey through a terrifying illness and his stay in hospital in the midst of the Covid pandemic. The dislocation from time and space. The weird, ongoing and mutable relationship with a body that up to this point has served him well and his isolation from the people who love him is a fragile, damaged fever dream that in quiet sentences and intimate gestures sketches a catastrophe and a recovery.

Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for this ARC.

Rating: 3.5 Stars, rounded up.

This is the second of Greenwell’s books that I have read (the first being What Belongs to You), which I will admit I didn’t love at the time I read it, yet it still had me intrigued enough to add his other work, Cleanness, to my tbr, and immediately request an ARC for this one when I saw it.

Small Rain deals with an unnamed narrator who experiences a medical crisis which leads to him immediately being admitted to the hospital, where he stays for essentially the entire duration of this novel. This is of course based on Greenwell’s own life, as his previously two novels have been too.

The story is told in a very stream-of-consciousness style, with descriptions of things currently happening to our narrator as he is experiencing this medical crisis interspersed with his thoughts wandering off to things outside his hospital room, such as previous life experiences, his relationship with both his partner and his family, as well as the topics of art and poetry specifically. I found this style to be a little hard to follow at times, yet also serving to enrich the story and offering a reprieve from the monotonous day-to-day experience of being “trapped” in your hospital bed.

This book is set around the time of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and discusses both the events of this as well as the events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement in that same timeframe. As someone who was extremely fortunate and has neither lost anyone through Covid nor had anyone experience complications related to it (In fact out of everyone I know who had Covid I somehow seemed to be the only one who had a more extreme reaction) I will ashamedly admit that I really didn’t think about it much after lockdowns were lifted and mask mandates were revoked, so being thrown back into the complicated time that this book references was both a difficult and, I think, important experience, especially with the current outbreak of Mpox, and the way we are seeing it “handled”.

I also liked the way the love between the narrator and his partner L was described, the domestic romanticism of it, as well as the issues that come with domesticity and the narrator’s own hangups and issues, many of which felt painfully relatable.

Overall I enjoyed this a lot more than Garthwell’s first work in this series (which is the wrong term, but the only way I know how to describe it) and it had me wishing I had prioritised reading Cleanness before Small Rain, though I will most definitely get to that as soon as I can.

‘ ‘Small Rain’ is no small feat of literary endeavour. It combines several poetic literary references and philosophical reflections on life, combined with content that reads like a medical memoir.

Stylistically, it’s cleverly experimentative because it’s totally devoid of dialogue. All speech is encapsulated within the text. Also, the names of medical staff are included but capital letters only are used to denote personal relationships, and it fails to name the narrator at all.

Medical details are microscopically described, which is fine by me as an ex-nurse but could be confronting if such things make people feel squeamish. I found it fascinating and integral to the story.

There are graphic descriptions of the protagonist’s symptoms and treatment following an acute admission to a dysfunctional American hospital during the global pandemic.

When the excruciating pain he has is diagnosed as a tear in the aorta, the primal fear and sense of lost agency are clearly depicted here, and familiar to all who have witnessed relatives in a situation like this or have experienced it for themselves.

The themes of the American dream, adaptation to serious illness, medical care, recovery, art, music and love are well described. There’s a relatable immediacy to the text that stirs up similar feelings in the reader, including empathy and sympathy for his plight.

As a poet myself, who writes and enjoys reading poetry books, I mostly loved all the poetic references. As a reader, I appreciated the excellent writing even if the text felt a bit like a professorial discourse sometimes. Grateful thanks to Picador and NetGalley for the eARC.

A very good book on the nature of illness and intimacy, Greenwell’s writing is spectacular in this deeply moving pandemic novel.