Reviews
Small Rain
“A priest of perception, Greenwell implicitly makes a moral claim about dwelling with details — a claim that reaches its apotheosis in ‘Small Rain’ .… This kind of looking not only consecrates the ordinary world, but makes a bridge between disparate ideas, bringing them to a level plane of existence …. There are other forebears I could name, but with a writer of Greenwell’s talents, surely the better question to ask is who will follow in his footsteps.” — Rhoda Feng, Boston Globe
“One of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had. The novel felt intimate in a way that had me in its grip from start to finish … A hypnotic experience … A reminder of the wonder available in our individual humanities should we take the time to look and listen.” — John Warner, Chicago Tribune
“Propulsive … we’re immersed in [the narrator’s] dazzling mind.” — People, Book of the Week
“The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator’s bracing account of his grueling ordeal (‘The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale’), serving as a palpable reminder to never take one’s health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work.” – Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“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… Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“There are few authors who make me feel as alive and rooted in my body as [Greenwell] does . . . Greenwell’s writing also adeptly captures how it feels to think. His gloriously winding sentences, in which art becomes a 'laboratory for thinking,' are as thought-provoking as they are pleasurable." - Ruth Madievsky, Interview Magazine
"Written with a sensitivity that is truly extraordinary." — Bartolomeo Sala, Something Curated
“Greenwell’s prose is enchanting—quiet, sensitive, gentle. Everything and everyone is held for attention with tender hands .… Within a single paragraph, Greenwell—in the space of the narrator’s mind and imagination—seamlessly takes us across time and around the globe …. Small Rain might help one imagine an art of living, the art of living gratefully, letting oneself believe, at least in our best moments, that grace is everywhere.” — James K. A. Smith, America
"Greenwell is a master sensualist on the page, drawing the reader into the physical experiences of the characters, whether it be a visual appreciation of a common sparrow’s beauty, the soaring emotion evoked by the sound of an opera singer’s voice, or even the burning pain of an IV needle shoved into a vein." - Samantha Dunn, Orange County Register
“A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details.” — Francesca Peacock, The Spectator
“An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love… An utter triumph of expression.” – The Bookseller
“Art, Greenwell shows us, expands and humanizes us. How the mundane (a sparrow, a cup of coffee, an avocado-oil chip!) can be charged with meaning, ‘absolute bliss.’ Against a backdrop of anger and confusion―over masks and vaccines, police brutality and protests, the ‘terrible slow catastrophe’ of climate crisis―Small Rain asserts the astonishing beauty of life.” ― Jessica Olin, Oprah Daily
“Generous, expansive ... Everywhere there is verbal astonishment … The concurrence of the actual and the philosophical is rare but precious.” ― Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter
“Garth Greenwell is one of our best contemporary prose stylists (due in part, no doubt, to his previous life as a poet), and a new book from him is always a cause for celebration. This novel, in fact, concerns a poet, who suddenly, and with no explanation, finds himself in incredible pain. No doctors can find the source, which makes the book hum with urgency, but of course the real questions Greenwell tackles here are much more metaphysical, though no less urgent—all of the questions of life, love, time, mortality, consciousness made crystalline.” – Emily Temple, Lit Hub (A Most Anticipated Book of 2024)
“Proustian in its scope, and painful in a Woolfesque way, [Small Rain] is a tour-de-force … Greenwell’s best work.” — Rahul Singh, Hindustan Times
“I’m hardly the first to note how the roots of “author” translate to “one who causes to grow.” Greenwell’s skill in this novel is to show this expansion at work, the subterranean rivers of obsession that carve out our rock …. Like Lispector, Saramago, Murnane, and other novelists whose unit is not the sentence or the paragraph but the novel itself, it’s this inward geometry that gives Greenwell’s style the logic of dreams — that enormous room you didn’t know had been hiding in your little apartment all along …. These hidden places, carved-out places, are a way to take time outside of time — to decouple time from its neoliberal synonym, money.” – Patrick Nathan, Entertainment, Weakly (Substack)
“Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell’s sensibility is rich and generous—the narrator's memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style.” – Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
“There's an unshowy genius to Garth Greenwell's prose that feels genuinely peerless among contemporary American novelists . . . Small Rain is a classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I'll be rereading it the rest of my life.” ― Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
“Small Rain is a marvel, one of America’s greatest writers working at the top of his game, moving into new territory with force and grace and wisdom and overwhelming beauty.” – Phil Klay, author of Missionaries
“Small Rain is not a book about the hospital or the medical system, however; it unfurls internally, in the consciousness of a character, a consciousness aware of itself evolving, shaped by a terrible new pain and knowledge . . . This is the real setting of Greenwell’s fiction―not the hospital, the classroom, the night clubs in Sofia, but this space that exists within them, within ordinary life, a realm unlatched by those forked sentences, in which time is slowed, and a deep, receptive kind of contact with the other, with the self, is permitted to bloom.” ―Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker“
An exquisite addition to the literature of illness . . . Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.” ―Meghan O’Rourke, Yale Review
“Profound . . . A paean to some of life’s most meaningful pleasures . . . A daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical. As in all great novels, its philosophical insights are spliced with details that root the work in a specific time and place but do nothing to diminish its timelessness.” ―Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post
“Prodding and prismatic in the ways it reflects our collective values of love and art in new light, Small Rain is a triumph of genuine vulnerability, crafted by an author who has already delivered some of the most memorable characters in modern fiction.” ―Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
“Garth Greenwell is unafraid to depict plainly what often goes unspoken, and his third novel, Small Rain, makes glorious progress toward filling in Dickinson’s blank . . . These sections cast a spell over the reader even in the most clinical moments . . . Inspiring acts of kindness and moments of mundane bureaucracy are depicted with the same tender attention . . . Small Rain’s sentences transform the clinical narration of a hospital stay into the soothing murmur of a prayer, or the steady sound of rain.”
―Walt Hunter, The Atlantic
“[The narrator’s] medical crisis begins when he is struck with sudden debilitating pain, which is brilliantly evoked in long exploratory sentences …. Greenwell makes medical diagnoses and hospital routines seem new and striking …. The strength of Small Rain is that it illuminates the complex realities of a body in pain — and what it is like to live with the uncertainty of it. Greenwell captures the ferocious inwardness of illness and the way it isolates you …. Very moving.” — Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
“An illuminating vision of human connection and the enduring power of art. Author Garth Greenwell’s lyrical prose and deep empathy shine through on every page, making Small Rain both an unforgettable story and a poignant meditation on what it means to live fully in the face of life’s greatest challenges.” ―Apple Books (Best of the Month)
“Small Rain reads like the work of a born novelist. The stream of consciousness narration, with few paragraph breaks and no quotation marks for dialogue, creates intensity and immersion and is the ideal vessel for the narrator's story and reveries … This style of narration, in Greenwell's hands, is also an effective way of distilling the times he is living through - and makes ordinariness feel fresh … Small Rain shows that it is by looking within ourselves for answers to the riddles of our lives that we stand the best chance of connecting meaningfully with the world around us.” — Max Liu, Financial Times
“As we can expect from Greenwell, [Small Rain] is a complex and beautiful queer love story that tackles art, memory, and more.”― Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya and Riese, Autostraddle
“In Garth Greenwell’s acutely observed and sensitively embodied newest, a poet lies in a hospital room, afflicted by the sudden onset of an excruciating pain. Amid IVs and paper cups of pills, a series of intimate relationships unfurl.” ―Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
“[A] novel about what it really means to be alive.”
―Shannon Carlin, TIME
“Throughout Small Rain, Greenwell’s massing, vascular prose, arranged in paragraphs that span many pages, deftly forces the reader to slow down and concentrate. His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a network of veins .… This is Greenwell’s great gift: finding forms for the representation of thought, much as the Impressionist painters, more than a century ago, found new forms for the representation of light …. If the banquet of eroticism in Cleanness caused me to on occasion hold my breath, Small Rain’s single sex scene made me wipe my eyes. Its enclosed and high-stakes choice of settings and situations — the ER and ICU during the height of COVID, the hard-won house and loving life partner, the glancing brush with death — grant the novel a blazing universality and grace.” — Sarah Thankam Matthews, New York Magazine
“And yet these frames are also of a piece with the ambition that suffuses this great American novel: to gaze unflinchingly upon everything, to drench each subject with the narrator’s looking … The best of Greenwell’s writing brings to mind an overflowing container, a surfeit of emotion and insight that is not wasted despite having exceeded its limit.” — Hannah Gold, The Nation
“Greenwell writes with exquisite precision about pain and loss―but his novel is equally a meditation on joy, beauty, and above all, love. Small Rain is a triumph, one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time.” ― Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
“Exquisite . . . Utterly mesmerising”—Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“I just didn't put it down… very romantic, incredibly moving.” – Miranda July, author of All Fours
“A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy.” – Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
“Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death.” ― Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“I’ve never read anything that so vividly captures the helplessness of a hospital stay. Greenwell weaves moments of clear-eyed misanthropy into a novel that is fundamentally about the beauty of life. Small Rain is claustrophobic, terrifying, soaringly philosophic. It will make you notice that you are alive, which is maybe the most important thing a book can do.”—Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam