RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... a book that defies easy classification. Various reviewers have called it a novel, while others deem it a short story collection, and others regard it as a novel told in stories. Yet as the book so eloquently conveys, labels and designations are both illusory and useless. What transpires in Cleanness is a moving, introspective rumination on rootlessness and longing within a strange land ... A strength of Greenwell’s is his ability to coalesce thoughtful literary prose with graphic descriptions of sex. Despite its sanitized title, Cleanness exposes readers to love and sex in all of its messy iterations, and it does so with a deftness of language that makes Greenwell one of the most accomplished writers of our era. By stripping the narrator of his name and identity, Greenwell allows readers to impose their own conclusions about the narrator’s actions and the choices he makes, whether he attempts to insinuate himself into the social life of his students or allows himself to be brutalized during a kinky sexual encounter ... Although Cleanness is an accomplished book, some readers may take issue not only with its graphic descriptions of sex but also Greenwell’s writing style, which deliberately refuses to adhere to rules regarding sentence structure and punctuation. Also, the use of initials instead of names may irritate readers with more conventional tastes ... demonstrates that boundaries between nations and cultures are confined only to maps and that individuals often become their truest selves in environments different from their own.
