RavePublic BooksGarth Greenwell...masterfully employs the art of explicit, empathetic description as a way of theorizing sex. Indeed, his latest novel, Cleanness, posits sex as central to life. Here, Greenwell challenges readers to see how the pleasures of sex, especially for queer people, can be foreclosed by what Rubin called the \'erotic injustice\' of shame. Yet he also shows how sex might be an act of difficult but healing care ... Cleanness defies easy summary ... it challenges us to feel resonances, to trace patterns, and to navigate shifts in scale between the narrator’s personal history and the political history of Bulgaria, his adopted home ... the nuance of Greenwell’s writing is astonishing. Here we have one of the truly great modern writers of sex, and this is not because his sex scenes are always sexy—though they are often that, too ... Greenwell’s greatness as a writer of sex—his keen, graphic, thrilling attention to bodies, orifices, fluids, and sensations—is not straightforwardly pornographic; it is also attuned to how emotional needs and power struggles play out in the sexual scenario ... a narrative of radical caring, a study of the mutual care that might exist beyond the mere payment of debts and the fulfillment of obligations. The book develops an image of care that is tested and enacted—sometimes finding rapturous expression, sometimes falling apart under the burdens of the uncaring past—in sex, in collective protest, and perhaps even in pedagogy.
