Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain garnered worldwide praise on its release last year. Its paperback release should do wonders for its readership: a short but tightly packed book, Greenwell’s novelistic voice is best read on an underground train back from work or on long summer breaks. Don’t be surprised to see Small Rain becoming a sensation.
That’s not to say that the reading is all plain sailing. Our unnamed protagonist has been admitted to hospital in his native Iowa with a condition his doctors cannot explain. Something life-threatening and mysterious forces a period of intense reflection from the hospital bed. Given that our bed-ridden host is a writer and teacher, there is much to please the aesthete here.
There are plenty of reflections on half remembered bits of poetry. There are also some slightly less interesting reflections on the politics of the coronavirus pandemic. The style is unique: the sentences are long and broken up, the chapters much longer. We are stuck most of the time on the hospital bed, and the dialogue is all indirect.
So far, then, Greenwell’s book may sound like interesting stuff, but nothing too pathbreaking. Some readers might have enough of what our protagonist calls the “cultural baggage” of this novel – the sentimentalised, middle-class American pleasantries which he acknowledges. Strangely, though, the best parts of this book are found in the most unexpected places.
His partner, L, is also a teacher, a professor. They have a house bought a few years ago, which has caused no end of financial and safety problems. Think how much time has been spent, how much money! Think how all those lofty ideas we had were taken away by the stress of paying the bills to make sure our house didn’t fall down, to pay off the dodgy contractors called in to fix it.
As he’s made to fear for his life, these defining problems come to seem trivial. This novel probes the question of how far perspective and reflection can take us. What seemed to define our life
suddenly seeps into irrelevance.
