Garth Greenwell continues to explore human consciousness through his fiction

This is very much a book about the body in crisis, and about an extreme physical experience,” Garth Greenwell says of his novel Small Rain over video call from New York City. “It does feel to me like a departure from my previous two books, but I also feel these points of continuity.”

Small Rain is the third novel in Greenwell’s critically garlanded oeuvre, which continues to explore the consciousness of the same narrator from his début novel What Belongs to You and second book, Cleanness. He hopes the books “intermingle as part of an unfolding project” that can either be read individually or as part of a collection. Set in Iowa during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Small Rain opens with the unnamed narrator in pain, and it quickly becomes clear that the young man is suffering from a life-threatening condition.

As he is inducted into the unique circadian rhythm of hospital life—becoming acquainted with surgical schedules, medical scans and drug administration—his mind roams between the past and present, exploring possible futures. This stream of consciousness, which moves between the hyper-real and surreal, enables Greenwell to delve into the intricacies of the human mind. “That’s been the project of all my books,” he says: “To try to get the experience of consciousness or one’s experience of consciousness onto the page.”

Small Rain is an exquisitely human novel, one that is deeply “invested in the subjective experience of the narrator”, and which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love, as well as the effervescence found in small moments.

Together the two men have built a life and a home, settling into a routine and the intimacy known to those who have spent time loving and caring for one another

Greenwell tells me he “underwent a medical crisis similar to that of the narrator”, and “want[ed] to try to find a way in fiction to try and process that experience and to capture the minute-to-minute experience of being a patient”. The audio edition will also be narrated by the author, who anticipates some passages to be “really hard [to read]”.

The narrative probes how identities are reshaped by crisis: everything becomes imbued with a new resonance because of this medical crisis and, as the narrative seamlessly moves throughout the narrator’s memories, vignettes become charged with mortality. The narrator continuously returns to his memories with his partner, referred to only as “L”: a poet, who he has been with for seven years. Together the two men have built a life and a home, settling into a routine and the intimacy known to those who have spent time loving and caring for one another. However, the narrator’s recollections of home ownership and the perils of house renovations are tinged with ambivalence as he pushes against the predictability and mundane aspects of their life.

Confined to a bed and surrounded by machinery, the narrator’s rancour is transformed and his attitude to life is reframed through the prism of his condition. Ultimately, Greenwell says, Small Rain is a “book about love” and how displays of intimacy- (fingertips touching across hospital wires, the “nonsense language that lovers create with each other”) become “charged with meaning”. “One of the deep questions of the book is how does one stay alive to the wonder of a love that lasts seven years?”

In reading Small Rain, you become acutely aware of how the body and the mind are changed by illness. The crisis divides the narrator’s life into before and after, the hospital acting as both a borderland between life and death and also the site of the narrator’s emotional transformation. Greenwell explains: “It’s not that the narrator comes to think: ‘Oh well, I guess this life is good enough’. Instead, he comes to realise: ‘Oh this life is actually wondrous, and I have not been adequate to the wonder of this life’.” Even at a granular level, the narrator comes to recognise how his identity, initially conceived of as this “sealed off self”, is “utterly dependent on this kind of intimacy” with his partner. It is in the hour L is allowed to visit the narrator in hospital that the latter “only fully exists as himself”, Greenwell says. In one of the most poignant moments of the novel, the narrator’s blood pressure is dangerously high and is lowered, not by medicine, but by L’s embrace.

Although the narrator is not suffering from Covid-19, the action is set during the pandemic, which provided a “background of heightened urgency”. The effects of the pandemic are pronounced in Small Rain: hospitals are overwhelmed with the living and the dead, families and relationships are threatened by hysteria and fake news and interactions are marked by face masks, gloves and sanitiser, which bring into sharp relief both the fallibility of the human body and the precarity at the centre of American life. “I think all my books are concerned with political reality, but this is a book that is explicitly concerned with political reality in a new way.”