RaveThe Los Angeles Times...to say we \'watch\' the narrator isn’t entirely apt. Greenwell is such a good writer that he makes us feel we are the narrator, and his struggle is our own. What is the life any of us want? And what if some of the things we want don’t fit into this desired life, and in fact seem to corrupt it, to make it impossible, to twist our very understanding of who we are? ... Cleanness is deliberately not being marketed as a novel nor as a short story collection; perhaps this could seem a gimmick, but in fact the book doesn’t fit easily into either label. Has Greenwell created a new form here, or is it more that our labels are paltry in the face of something truly singular? ... Greenwell’s writing — long, dense sentences that often seem to act as heat-seeking missiles — seems married perfectly to the form of this book, where the usual narrative stitching of a novel is done away with. What we are left with are precise evocations of emotion and heat (and what heat! There is so much heat in this book it is sometimes difficult to hold). The book thrums with life; it invites readers to a state of higher intensity, such that as you move through it you begin to feel an awareness of and an awe at the possibility that life could actually be lived that way. The intimacy that Cleanness invites us into — not only of its sexual encounters and its love but also of a man’s deepest wrestling with his own pain — is a space not many writers are sensitive or skilled enough to bring readers into, and it is one that seems to answer the question that the book poses about what life we might want to live.
