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Review: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Review of Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; $28; 320 pages; September 3, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

Despite the limitless expanse of the mind, the body is a woefully constrained vessel. In Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, a mysterious illness seizes, reduces, and ultimately enlightens a poet. While the medical dilemma of the protagonist is harrowing, his rich, compassionate interiority provides succor. “I became a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul.”

The poet in Small Rain is an avatar for Greenwell who suffered an aneurysm a few years back and was left with a temporary inability to read anything save for the poems of George Oppen, whose work provides the protagonist of the novel solace. Analyzing one of Oppen’s poems, “And All Her Silken Flanks with Garlands Drest,” the narrator speculates: “It’s a whole theory of civilization, that image, the flowers and the slaughter, the flowers covering the slaughter. And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.”

Small Rain is as distressing as it is consoling. Greenwell’s stream of consciousness brings us close to the machinations of emergency room procedure, terror, and uncertainty. “Everyone had been so relentlessly heterosexual.” He unflinchingly illustrates the inherent humiliation of physical examination, the demoralization of pain (“It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence”), and all our misgivings with the American medical establishment. Trauma attends the triage experience and the mysterious illness that plagues the protagonist until a dreaded diagnosis is ultimately disclosed: an infrarenal aortic dissection.

“There was something terrible about watching the people around me, terrible and irresistible, I wanted to see into their lives, but had no right to,” the poet admits. “Most of the people in the waiting room were like windows left dark, blank or withdrawn, scrolling on their phones or staring into space.”

Upon diagnosis, a fleet of doctors and nurses treat the poet like a medical anomaly. The micro emphasis on the protocol of hospital personnel and their intensive care procedures fosters an experiential nightmare. Timing is no friend either, as the poet’s catastrophic biological incident unfolds during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the risk of infection heightens the already nerve-shredding scenario.

Also buzzing in the background, finding its way into the poet’s contemplations, are the national demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd murders. The poet is a highly conscionable empath, but Greenwell avoids tropes of virtue signaling. His poet is a complex human who is duly outraged by cruelty, injustice, and indifference; however, it is the juxtaposition of police brutality with the politicization of the coronavirus, mask mandates, and vaccinations that deeply troubles the poet: “Twitter was full of everyone calling everyone a fascist, so that the word meant nothing—which was the real danger, I thought, words meant nothing, the way any word could be made to mean nothing; it was a way of erasing reality, or of placing reality beyond our grasp, real facts, real values, it was a tyranny of meaninglessness.”

Small Rain is reminiscent of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit: a person of the mind is diminished and imprisoned by a dire medical condition, forced to confront memories and ideologies and shortcomings and desires and mortality. Here, the poet reflects on his life, including the fond introduction to his lover, moments from childhood (“childhood is not health…there is no bigger lie in literature”), exchanges with his mother, and growing up in an abusive household. There is a sense of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in terms of disease and the literary mind. The cerebral, lyrical thoughts find art, history, and philosophy to help comprehend the dehumanizing dilemma and find meaning in the suffering. “Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.”  

Sometimes that literary mind—impractical and useless when met with a clinical crisis, despite its salvation of the soul—crashes against the cold, necessary logic of medicine and technology: “My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that 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.”

The poet, like Greenwell, possesses a generous mind, and his musing turns also to his husband, a renowned Spanish poet (“It was the least dramatic, the least anxious beginning to any relationship I had ever had: no anguished uncertainty, no sleepless nights, just a new fact in the world”); their house in Iowa, which is an old money pit in perpetual disrepair; his long-term teaching assignment in Romania; and his time in graduate school earning his MFA in poetry. The constant assault and failure and expenses incurred on his old house feels Job-like, and he finds metaphors to his health, as well as to birds and to poetry. He also considers the sad, beautiful demise of the oak trees on his property: “It was beautiful how they died, in the wild, in the forests; as they rotted and the wood softened, more animals took shelter in them, even after they fell, they served a purpose, enriching the soil, they had long lives and long deaths.”

Greenwell originally studied music in his youth, then poetry, and there is a musicality in his prose as a result. “I was the opposite of philosophical, a miniscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the entire world.”  Small Rain is written with warmth, sensitivity, and great accessibility, but never with even a hint of treacle. Instead, the novel leaves us with a desire to embrace life’s clichés: live fully, passionately, openly, and hold to the people and things that enhance you, not the least of which is art itself. “Poetry,” the poet tells us, “is the accoutrement of the self.”