Ultimately, the narrator is haunted by his inability to be a mentor in the hazy, perpetually half-lit world of illicit desire. But in addition to dismay I felt satisfaction or pride at having provided (as I thought of it) some degree of solace, and maybe this was the bigger part of what I felt. I felt two things as he spoke, first my usual dismay when talking to gay men here, who were more excluded than I had been, growing up in the American south, where at least I had found books that, even if they were always tragic, offered a certain beauty as compensation. In its first chapter, the narrator sits down for a conversation with one of his students in a crowded cafe, where the smoke-stained windows give off a light that is “strangely muted, as if steeped in tea.” When the student comes out to the narrator, Greenwell’s skills as a shrewd anatomist of the multi-paned psyche take center stage: Set, like What Belongs to You, in contemporary Bulgaria, the novel likewise describes the life of a gay expat American teacher as he navigates the culture of illicit hook-ups and veiled desires in a foreign city.Īn episodic narrative told in clean slices that resemble self-contained short stories, Cleanness has a familiarly autofictional capsule structure.
Greenwell’s newest work, Cleanness, returns to the same world, offering a deeper excavation of the sordid ballet of human desire and a fresh dose of his incisive investigations of social and sexual alienation. What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell’s first novel, was one of the most acclaimed releases of 2016, combining an icily postmodern sense of alienation and displacement with a heartbreaking analysis of a doomed love affair between the narrator, Greenwell’s stand-in, and a directionless Bulgarian youth.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | January 14, 2020
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