SMALL RAIN

Greenwell, who has written so evocatively about desire and sex in What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), now probes something quite different: life-threatening illness.

With no warning and a violent eruption of pain so intense it felt like someone “plunged a hand into [his] gut and grabbed hold and yanked,” the narrator suffers an infrarenal aortic dissection—a tear of the inner layer of his aorta. It’s a sometimes fatal malady that usually happens to people older than the narrator, who’s in his 40s. Deeply reluctant during the pandemic to go to the hospital in Iowa City, he endures the pain at home until his partner, L, convinces him to get treatment. The medical staff is alarmed, and also titillated, by encountering such a rare malady. The narrator of this autofiction endures lab test after lab test and must learn how to be powerless—how, for example, to refrain from using the bathroom near his ICU bed by himself or how to walk there without tangling the many wires and IV lines threaded from his body. As usual in a Greenwell novel, the tangents are tantalizing, and with so much time spent inert and left to ponder, the narrator finds his imagination flying beyond his hospital bed to the fracturing of his family, his life with and love for L, and the implications of their disastrous home renovations. But this is a novel about bodies and how weird they are, and Greenwell often returns to thinking about them. “What a strange thing a body is,” he writes, “…and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well.” There’s more suspense here than in Greenwell’s previous work, as the reader is eager to discover the outcome of the narrator’s illness: How will he get out of the ICU and return to life?

Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.