Small Rain: A Novel
“For all its occasional longeurs, Small Rain is often gripping and sometimes heartwarming.”
Garth Greenwell’s chronicle of bodily trauma and the reawakening of love begins with a sentence that captures an all-too-common experience: “They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” That the doctor’s measure of pain has no relation to what the patient is suffering epitomizes the separation between patient and the medical establishment that is one of principal themes of Small Rain. The pain can only be described in simile: “It was like someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked, trying to turn me inside out and failing and trying again.” Doctors want terms that measure and define: patients live experiences that demand more poetic language.
These early sentences also establish the style of Greenwell’s novel—compound or complex sentences sprinkled with commas. Paragraphs that can run for more than a page. The ghost of Henry James hovers over this book, though James would have been shocked at Greenwell’s fascination with physical experience, whether it is the intense pain in this novel or the intense sexual experiences described in Greenwell’s earlier works
Greenwell’s previous works of fiction place his central figure in an alien culture—a young American poet-teacher living, working, and loving in Bulgaria. In Small Rain, the same character, now in early middle-age, finds himself in a small city in the American heartland, Iowa City, where he lives a domestic existence with his partner, a Spanish poet. For a nomad, this is a new, different environment. The sudden onset of a serious medical issue, a tear in the lining of his aorta, places him in an even stranger world, a large university hospital, where he is told the second worst thing a patient can hear—that his case is “interesting.” Academic doctors love puzzles and won’t stop until they get a solution.
Greenwell precisely describes every probe of a doctors’ or nurses’ hands, every stick of a needle. The medical trauma realigns the narrator’s relationship to his own body. Toward the end of his stay in the hospital, as he recalls his kindest nurse wiping him down, he thinks of his feelings about his body: “I had hated it so much and been so ashamed and I might have loved it instead, I thought suddenly, it had been all that time available for love and it had never occurred to me to love it. . . .”
The hospital, from this patient’s point of view, is an alien environment. Doctors and nurses have their set ways around patients, but through his open door he can hear staff talking about their lives outside the hospital. One doctor, Dr. Fourier, and one nurse, Amiva, break the wall of official behavior and reveal their own personalities. The hospital can also be a place of danger. One gum-chewing young nurse almost makes a mistake that could have risked his life.
Life in the hospital also makes him sensitive to time. While his body is put on a rigid schedule of checks from nurses, medications, tests, visits from doctors and their students, the loss of a sense of mental time allows his mind to wander far afield into memories and ruminations about poetry, music, politics. He vividly remembers being alone in his home during a violent storm. There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to the novel as the narrator can do nothing but lie in his bed and think.
Above all he thinks about his devoted partner, “L” (the people closest to him remain nameless), and the home they have built together. His new relationship to his body makes him appreciate what he had taken for granted: “That feeling, the feeling of being loved, the surprise of it, had faded over the years, with domesticity and its constant minor frictions, its impediments to freedom; but it was still there, and it flooded me now.”
The novel would have benefitted from some pruning. Some of the digressions, particularly those about poetry and the teaching of poetry make one wish that Greenwell would get back to his principal story and setting. He seems to see the novel as a medium for expressing his personal passions and antipathies. Still, since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, there have been very few works of serious fiction that have dealt with illness’s assault on the body and psyche and the experience of being a patient. For all its occasional longeurs, Small Rain is often gripping and sometimes heartwarming.
At the end, our narrator is in the park with his beloved partner playing with his sister’s rambunctious dog. In the novel’s last sentence, he celebrates the dog as “pure life.” This is an apt, lovely description to end a novel about the perils of living.