RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)What’s remarkable about Greenwell’s first work is the way it navigates the currents of shame, desire, and disgust that underlie perceptions and experiences of queer life. It becomes clear that this sense of shame has, and continues to, colour the narrator’s adult life ... Garth Greenwell’s great subject is the New World’s encounter with Europe and his question: ‘how do you love in the face of shame?’ Greenwell sits in a long lineage of fictional transatlanticism, notably tracked by Henry James and Edmund White ... That Jamesian sense of a mind ruminating, wandering, and finding hard-fought-for moments of clarity permeates Greenwell’s prose ..intimate, intense, and often surreal writing ... In his review of Greenwell’s earlier novel in the New York Times, Aaron Hamburger refers to John Updike’s complaint that ‘gay’ fiction has ‘nothing to interest straight readers… in gay stories nothing is at stake but self-gratification’ ... Greenwell, like Chee, alongside a new generation of American LGBTIQ+ writers such as Saeed Jones and Ocean Vuong, is determined to make us care. Cleanness is a confronting, moving, and remarkable work of art that provides us with a fresh, and very queer examination of human intimacy, relationships, and desire. It should cement Greenwell’s international reputation and blow up the heteronormative notions of the Updikes of this world.
