Small Rain
A Novel
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4.0 • 32 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Financial Times, New Statesman, and more
A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year
A New York Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A medical crisis becomes a profound exploration of life, love, and art in this harrowing novel. When his world is upended by a sudden, excruciating pain, an unnamed poet lands in the ICU during the terrifying uncertainty of the early COVID-19 pandemic. Confined to a hospital bed, he’s forced to confront both his own mortality and the stark realities of the American healthcare system. As he grapples with the raw vulnerability of his situation, the poet reflects on his life, his relationship with his partner, and the marvel and fragility of the body he has long taken for granted. The sweeping narrative expands beyond the confines of the hospital, offering 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A gay poet struggles with a mysterious and agonizing pain in Greenwell's intense latest (after Cleanness). Wracked with debilitating agony that stretches through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator is urged by his partner, L, to see a doctor. After waiting for hours in the emergency room, he endures a battery of examinations and tests. Eventually, he receives a shocking diagnosis of life-threatening aortic tearing. Weeks of hospitalization and grueling procedures follow, and over the course of his slow recovery, the narrator juxtaposes raw depictions of his vulnerability and helplessness with excoriating critiques of the healthcare industry's inequities and inefficiencies and the alienation he feels among the "relentlessly heterosexual" staff. The narrator also reflects on his dysfunctional family history; meeting L as a creative writing student in Iowa City, where he's remained after graduating seven years earlier; and the negotiations he and L have gone through to find happiness and fulfillment in their shared living space. 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.
Customer Reviews
Intriguing Title
I really, really liked this book. I don’t want to talk about “themes” and/or “plot-lines”, those words are too trite for this story. I'll admit that as a nurse I was intrigued because of the backdrop of a “youngish” man who finds himself in an overburdened hospital ER at the beginning of the COVID pandemic discovering that he is dealing with a rare and life-threatening condition with a 75% mortality rate. I didn’t expect that he would grab me by the collar and pull me through the ordeal with him, detailing his fears, his disappointments, his fears, his failings, his fears, his poetry, his fears, his memories. Being told you are at risk of dying at any moment and at the mercy of a staff of healthcare workers who you don’t know a thing about makes one very vulnerable. I felt honored that he trusted me enough to share his concerns and his intimacies. I'm glad to have met L and learned about their enchanted relationship . . . and it is enchanted. The narrator loves intensely, most everyone. I like him. Like him, I like just about everyone in his story. I like that he reminded me that it's the little things in life that we take for granted that make life worth living. Worth fighting for. The small things that are all so wondrous. That we need them to get through it all. That we have to make concessions sometimes because life isn’t perfect. Sometimes it's simply watching the dogs at the dog park chasing balls that shows you life is worth living. And we need each other. Thank you, narrator . . . I didn’t catch your name . . .