‘Small Rain’: A Book Review

‘Small Rain’: A Book Review

Blog Article

“I wanted to put it all behind me,” the narrator of Small Rain freely concedes. “I wanted to be on the other side again of that gulf that separates the sick from the well—or what seems like a gulf, I had crossed it in the flash.”

At the height of the pandemic, when hospitals were overrun and best-avoided from risk of infection, the narrator of Garth Greenwell’s third novel suffers a spasm of intense pain. A tear in his aorta worsens from an infection tied to a seemingly rational decision to postpone care. With hospitals “one of the likeliest places to get infected,” they become “the last place one would go for help” unless required.

The infection leads to an 11-day stay in an ICU, during which, as a poet, he confronts a host of questions, including how much time he has left, how best to live, uncertain whether the condition will worsen, and whether it has already impacted his lifespan.

A profound read, Small Rain is unflinching in wanting to capture “the terrible slow catastrophe happening everywhere, the fires in the west and floods in the east, the storms that devastated the middle of the country, that had devastated Iowa just a couple of weeks before.”

As important, the narrator’s “sense of the world coming undone” isn’t reducible to his experience of illness. If it were, the larger message of Small Rain—of renewed love and connection from transfigured experience—could be lost among the machines and IV drips that connect to various parts of the narrator, turning even the slightest movement into a painful ordeal.

The risk of “fatally failing”—a phrase in the novel describing the hurricane-battered house the narrator and his partner have labored to restore—permeates everything and, it seems, everyone. “I was healthy,” he explains, “and still thought of myself as young, young-ish; I thought of myself as lucky is what I mean, I guess, though really I didn’t think much of my health much at all, which was the luck, the privilege of health.” If treatment is successful, there’s the pressing question of how to live—what to do differently, including with those closest.

Like Greenwell’s earlier, award-winning Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Small Rain draws on autobiographical experience, in ways that push beyond autobiography. The chapter on the emergency is so vivid and precise it should be assigned in med school and across health care. It includes a diagnostic crisis over the aneurysm’s likely cause; a mistake over medication raises the stress to an almost unbearable pitch.

“America’s Ills”

Small Rain, an unnamed reviewer observes, also broadens from a “remarkably convincing portrait of a body in crisis [into] a compelling examination of contemporary America’s ills.” The narrator’s days in the ICU involve probing what it means to survive a pandemic resulting in mass casualty and death; how to maintain sanity and hope when both appear elusive and improbable; and why forms of extremism can take hold that aren’t just noxious and corrosive, psychically and socially, but likely to worsen and prolong the pandemic, deepening the pain that it has already inflicted on so many:

For years I had wondered at American irrationality, and never more than during the pandemic, when the most basic facts of life had been called into question, when calling them into question had become for much of my country a kind of declaration of allegiance, an identity. … Politicians … called mandates an infringement of personal liberty, government overreach, the onset of fascism; the internet was full of videos of people chanting in Target or Walmart, telling others to take off their masks, to assert their agency … My crazy country, I thought, my coming-apart country.

Report this page