A profound exploration of the body in pain: Garth Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain.’

On this episode of Fully Booked, poet and novelist Garth Greenwell discusses Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 3). This intimate new novel features the same unnamed narrator from Greenwell’s critically acclaimed debut, What Belongs to You(2016), and follow-up, Cleanness(2020). After returning to the U.S. from Sofia, Bulgaria, the narrator faces a medical emergency at the height of the pandemic.

“Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of Small Rain. Here’s a bit more:

“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. 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.…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.’”

We begin our conversation at the beginning of Small Rain: with a poet-narrator experiencing a bolt of pain, in the gut and the groin, that doesn’t subside for eight hours. Greenwell describes what happens to the narrator in the aftermath of this initial shock. We talk about the particular scariness of hospitals in a pandemic, and the prohibition of congress (i.e., coming together). I ask him what kind of art he values, and whether an artist can know the value of what they’ve made. We then discuss a wide range of topics including but not limited to Colored Television by Danzy Senna, medical euphemisms, The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasm, and how novels make us feel.

Then editors Mahnaz Dar, John McMurtrie, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

The Soldier’s Friend: Walt Whitman’s Extraordinary Service in the American Civil War by Gary Golio, illus. by E.B. Lewis (Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers)

Connie by Connie Chung (Grand Central Publishing)

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman/Viking)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

The Holovid Hero by David M. Pearce

City of Blood and Fire by Kevin Harkness

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.