Tag: Brian Alessandro

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 “Most of the people in the waiting room were like windows left dark, blank or withdrawn, scrolling on their phones or staring into space.”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.”

Review of All the World Beside, by Garrard Conley, Riverhead Books, 352 pages, $28, Publication Date: March 26, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

 

Though Garrard Conley’s transcendent debut, All the World Beside, is ostensibly about an eighteenth century gay love affair between Arthur Lyman, a physician, and Nathaniel Whitfield, a reverend, the novel is chiefly concerned with the nature of desire and the salvation of the soul.

 

The story unfolds in Cana, Massachusetts amid the Puritan push for utopia. Arthur is married to the bold, scandalous Anne while Nathaniel’s wife is the accommodating, unwell Catherine. Both men have children. Arthur’s daughter, Martha, and Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, eventually become friends by way of Anne’s engineering, but it is Ezekiel, Nathaniel’s son, around whom the plot is framed. His letters to Sarah, years after the central events of the novel, anchor the story, providing an additional layer of tragedy.

 

We soon learn that Ezekiel, named after the prophet who saw the demise of Jerusalem, is answering for the sins of his father through exile. While Nathaniel is away with Arthur, Sarah becomes possessed by righteousness and castigates the citizens of Cana who are swayed by a swindler selling watches. She scolds them for their pagan proclivities, claiming they have become Satan’s puppets, especially her father who sins with Arthur, and her mother who hides his sin. Sarah feels responsible for the town’s great awakening. The Great Awakenings—a succession of religious revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers that gripped believers throughout the early eighteenth century and into the late twentieth century—play a central role in the novel.

 

When Ezekiel’s mother calls a group of French sex workers “nobodies,” Ezekiel internalizes the notion of a “nobody” as someone without a home, free to do as they like, including finding a home as they see fit, a “terrifying and exciting” prospect. We learn that Ezekiel was cast off to the hinterlands because he would not betray Nathaniel and Arthur, his “two fathers.” In his quiet despair, Ezekiel questions a “God who has created such impossible conditions.”

 

Conley does not hide his numerous parallels to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: pilgrim judgment, shunning, damning ostracization, banishment, and the weight of mortal transgression, along with the characters’ names themselves. The novel intrigues and mesmerizes with its density of complex histories, scandalous pasts, tormenting secrets, and haunting lies.

 

Conley’s revelatory 2016 memoir, Boy Erased, also dealt with the cruel and ignorant things people do in the name of religion, but with compassion and insight. Homosexuality and Christianity coexist in an uneasy arrangement in Conley’s personal world, as in his fiction. The characters treat each other with care, tenderness, and concern for their well-being. Even Nathaniel and Arthur are protected and loved by their families and communities.

 

All The World Beside is largely a meditation on the simplicity, beauty, and goodness of nature and faith, despite the pain both cause. The characters are at the nonnegotiable pull of a wild will and its demands, as well as the imagined expectations of God. The punishments doled out by religious law seem unreasonable, even draconian, but in Conley’s view, these are the products of fear and reverence. In a moment of the metaphysical melding with the scientific, Nathaniel says to Arthur, “You said wounds allow love to enter the body more freely.”

 

Conley’s voice is clear but ambiguous, gentle but never coddling, and firm but not merciless. His spare language is imbued with an assurance that disarms with its sincerity. The novel was born of Conley’s conversation with his Missionary Baptist father, and a subsequent objective to prove queer people existed and even thrived during the 1700s. The eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, after all, and enlightenment meant privileging science over blind faith. These dualities are at play in the relationship between Nathaniel, a man of faith, and Arthur, a practitioner of medicine. Nathaniel is responsible for the town’s spiritual health while Arthur bears responsibility for the inhabitants’ physical wellbeing. The soul and the body intermingle. The divine and the material parry.

 

By virtue of the milieu and period, Conley tells an elemental story about faith and nature, free from civilized constructions and cultural touchstones. The focus here is on engagement with God, with imagination, with the soil, and, finally, with each other. Still, there pervades a din of the superstitious, the anxiety of bearing a mark and being damned, the devil lurking in the shadows, ready to claim his due. “The devil never forces a hand. He is cleverer than that. He tempts.” Nature itself possesses evil, or at least, indifferent properties. But God is everywhere too. The divine is a constant presence and a perpetual promise, a goal to work toward, and a pleasure to be earned.

 

The love shared between Nathaniel and Arthur feels like an invention, even if the men discover that their shared feelings are all too familiar. Theirs is the possible start of a freer land, one of not just national possibilities but also a sexual renaissance. “We just invented it,” says Nathaniel to Arthur. “Never before has another man done what I have done or felt what I have felt. God did not create this. It is not natural. It is not divine. It is nothing but what it is, here in this bed.”

 

Though the families keep their secrets, Nathaniel and Arthur’s love harms them. Sarah, in her rapturous call to duty, believes that their sin prevents the salvation of the town. “A town must be safe before it may be saved,” claims a parishioner named Priscilla. Conley maintains nebulous motives for his characters, especially the men’s families. Do they keep the secret of the affair to protect their husbands and fathers, or to protect themselves? To ensure the awakening unfolds unsullied, or to preserve the fantasy of their faith? Catherine tells Sarah, “Men have the power to change. Women cannot change, not really; they have no such luxury, but men change all the time.”

 

All The World Beside’s bittersweet tone is perhaps best captured by Catherine who, overcome by her family’s lot in life, laments, “There is life yet to mourn the loss of beauty.”

 

Conley ends with an academic postscript that rigorously assays the hidden history of LGBTQ life. He so expertly evokes the eighteenth century that the modern thoughts and words of the closing essay stand as a jarring contrast and pointed reminder of where we’ve been and where we are. In the end, Conley tells a story that feels ancient but somehow new, and he does so with grace, restraint, and generosity. His characters are as alive and urgent today as they would have been over 250 years ago, and the world, though changed, remains in many heartbreaking and healing ways, the same.