The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others’ suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel.
Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.
L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that “on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.
To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, “I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that,” it’s only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.
As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator’s ailment, but that’s really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator’s distress call with “We do have other patients,” to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.
