Cleanness

“In much the way that other male American writers, such as Hemingway, Baldwin and Edmund White, have chosen Paris as the place in which their lone protagonist can be tested and changed, Greenwell uses Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, as his caldron … Greenwell displays an extraordinary skill at handling time … The writing about sex achieves an unusual depth of accuracy both about physical activity and emotional undercurrent … An exquisite piece of writing that uses a simple plaintive system to create a complex emotional effect … One of the problems that any gay writer faces is how to depict happiness … Greenwell fully explores what fear and secrecy and solitude look like for gay men … However, in the second section of his book, called ‘Loving R.,’ he dramatizes happiness … ‘The Frog King,’ rivals John Updike’s ‘The Happiest I Have Been,’ set in the same Christmas season, as a great American story about happiness.” – Colm Tóibín, The New York Times Book Review

“Incandescent ... [Greenwell's] writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage ...Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene [of Cleanness] glows with meaning. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata ...This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss. In the case of “Cleanness,” Greenwell’s third work of fiction, I initially curled up with the book, savoring the sensuous richness of the writing, and then I found myself sweating a little, uncomfortably invested in the rawness of the scene. The cause was a story titled “Gospodar,” in which the narrator, an American teacher living in Bulgaria, hooks up with a man who begins by play-acting violence and then veers toward the real thing. The transition from fantasy to horror is accomplished with the deftness of a literary magician, and Greenwell repeats the feat even more unnervingly in a later story, “The Little Saint,” in which his likable narrator takes the role of the aggressor rather than the victim. These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition.” – Alex Ross, The New Yorker, Best Books of 2020

“Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating. What distinguishes him is an ability to make sex on the page genuinely dramatic, by integrating its motions and sensations into the established stakes of the narrative … If the book is imagined as a body, then cleanness – a total lack of shame in putting sexual passion on the page – is what it achieves in these refreshing depictions. In one brilliant passage, Greenwell even redeems pornographic language itself … A glorious, affirmative vision.” – Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement

“Greenwell’s writing―long, dense sentences that often seem to act as heat-seeking missiles―seems married perfectly to the form of this book, where the usual narrative stitching of a novel is done away with. What we are left with are precise evocations of emotion and heat (and what heat! There is so much heat in this book it is sometimes difficult to hold). [Cleanness] thrums with life; it invites readers to a state of higher intensity, such that as you move through it you begin to feel an awareness of and an awe at the possibility that life could actually be lived that way.” – Nellie Hermann, Los Angeles Times

"[Greenwell] writes beautiful sentences. There is no superfluous or perfunctory language, and no matter how turbulent or overwrought the content of what he is describing, the prose is always scrupulously controlled . . . The reader is treated to his unfailingly intelligent observations, his acute ability to describe what he sees and thinks and feels. . . . The spell does not break . . . Some of the most affecting and beautiful scenes in his books have nothing to do with sexual identity or gay desire but involve exquisite observations about others whose vulnerability has touched the narrator’s heart . . . Each of these scenes is radiant with kindness, and, for me, reading them was like a balm. Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power." – Sigrid Nunez, The New York Review of Books

“Searingly immediate and authentic ... The theme beneath the flesh is powerful and subtle: a quest for the kind of intimacy which, rather than confirming a lover's identity, upends it." – The Economist

“Garth Greenwell’s “Cleanness” contains some of the most sublime writing on desire I’ve read in years.” – Parul Sehgal, The New York Times, The Year in Books

“Having written one of the best debuts of recent years, Garth Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, did not disappoint. A hypnotic insight into the sexual life of an American teacher in Sofia, Greenwell revels in long, atmospheric monologues exploring the complex relationship between loneliness and promiscuity. If Henry Miller and Edmund White had a literary son, his name would be Garth Greenwell.” – John Boyne, The Irish Times, Best Books of 2020

“I read this book while traveling through Iraq as protests roiled Baghdad, protests that shared much with those Greenwell’s narrator encounters at one point in the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria—an energetic movement driven by the young, full of disgust at corruption and incompetent governance, though lacking in clear ideas for solutions. The narrator’s reflections on protest and politics, the role of ideas and passions and rage and violence, continued to echo with me throughout 2020. But politics, ultimately, is not where this book rests. Greenwell has bigger game in sight, and politics is only one small way characters in this book try to articulate themselves, find communion with others, and express and act on their sometimes self-annihilating desires. This has been a year of political fervor that at times outpaces careful reflection. Greenwell articulates new visions of our inner core, something precious at any time, but especially in times like these, with such little respect for the vital, and often deeply private work of being human.” – Phil Klay, Mother Jones

“Exquisite ... Greenwell displays a precocious ability to take readers into his narrator's mind and body ... Greenwell submerges readers in the bedroom, sharing his protagonist's intense attractions and doubts ... Greenwell's prose sings, even as much of the music occurs in the rests. This writer understands beauty and loss, sorrow and hope, his fluid writing making the telling seem effortless.” – Martha Ann Toll, NPR Books

“An electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves … The book’s sex scenes unfold like revelations, effortlessly braiding inner drama with precisely choreographed intimacy. Greenwell’s long, luxuriously becomma’d sentences, always on the edge of ending, create a tension receptive to the lightest touch: a shift in rhythm, or one clause’s tiny revision of its predecessor, can entirely alter the chemistry of a scene. He melds an incantatory cadence with the catechistic language of porn, which is ridiculous until you’re ‘lit up with a longing that makes it the most beautiful language in the world.’ … Intimately powerful.” – Julian Lucas, Harper’s

“Extraordinary ... The overall effect is even more impressive than [What Belongs to You] ... The range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound ... Incomparably bittersweet ... Brilliant.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“You should read this book because it contains the year’s most thrilling sex writing. Sure, Greenwell writes sensually about many things—he’s a stylist’s stylist, whose use of the semicolon has inspired rapturous close readings—but the uncanny presence of his sentences is perhaps best felt in his descriptions of bodies. Cleanness, like Greenwell’s previous book, What Belongs to You, centers on an unnamed narrator who teaches literature in Sofia. (Greenwell himself lived in Bulgaria for several years.) The interlinked stories circle notions of pleasure, violence, and the self. Greenwell is interested in the transformations that might be found in the loss of ego; he pursues the question through sadomasochistic flings, conducted against the crumbling backdrop of a once shining capital. In the book’s middle section, the narrator turns from alienation to joy, describing his relationship with a Portuguese student, R. Though the connection doesn’t last, being with R. feels like ‘a kind of cleanness,’ Greenwell writes, in which one’s essence is not shattered but offered, intact, to the beloved: ‘Anything I am you have use for is yours.’” – Katy Waldman, “My Favorite Fiction of 2020,” The New Yorker

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.” – Frank Bidart

“So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire and determination as Garth Greenwell’s writing does. His sensibility is akin to James Baldwin’s, and he observes the world with eyes like those of Tolstoy. With shimmering prose and undiluted intensity, Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability.” – Yiyun Li

“Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex—locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradations, our sweetness, confusion, and rage. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison. His perfect noticing extends to the way we experience love and loneliness, the feeling of exile, and the eternal search for home—wherever, or in whomever, that may be found. I am always recommending Garth Greenwell to everyone.” – Sheila Heti

“I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. These stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.” – Carmen Maria Machado

“If Henry James were alive in this strange century, if Thomas Mann had been allowed to write raw sex, if Virginia Woolf had slummed it more, if Proust had been born in Kentucky, if they all commingled their blood and brains, we might get something like Garth Greenwell. Cleanness lives between Europe and America, between novel and story, between fiction and the self. It is indescribable, and it is genius.” – Rebecca Makkai

“In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn't know—until now—how to describe. Greenwell maps the realms our language walls off—sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar—and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I've never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master.” – Alexander Chee

“A novel of devastating honesty and beauty. A gorgeous literary line runs from Death in Venice to Giovanni's Room to A Boy's Own Story to What Belongs to You, and, now, Cleanness, and I will follow it to the last word.” – David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

“Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth.” – Lisa Taddeo

“Cleanness is a novel of such vivid sensuality that you can almost taste it, and the book’s trio of (I can think of no other term) sex arias are almost harrowingly erotic. But just as memorable are the author’s minute observations. There is magic in seeing the world through Greenwell’s eyes.” – Benjamin Dreyer

“Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth.” – Adam Haslett

“An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel—Garth Greenwell writes like no one else.” – Eimear McBride

“Cleanness is an impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist—to fight.” – Edouard Louis

“Garth Greenwell’s sentences breathe, and are alive in completely unpredictable ways. Words are voyages says John Donne. Greenwell is a novelist whose art makes a poet stand on his toes.” – Ilya Kaminsky

“Garth Greenwell writes with remarkable power, vulnerability and an operatic beauty. Such is the compelling journey of the characters of this book that we come to a new understanding of the body, loneliness, risk, desire and even anguish, but also a tenderness, a hard-won grace that can and does transform. What he leaves us with is an absolute truth – love is what drives us all towards light, towards any kind of redemption, but we must earn it, we must give all to it.” – Chris Abani