RaveThe Blue Nib (UK)Though only his second novel, Cleanness illustrates that Greenwell is one of the most exciting, and essential, writers working today. His style is at once unobtrusive yet distinct: his sinuous paragraphs are peppered with comma splices, pristine description, and discreet imagery; his sincere tone, with its insistence on the significance of the everyday, takes its cues from pre-Ulysses James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, while his commitment to the subject of same-sex love springs organically from the writings of James Baldwin, Edmund White, and Colm Toibín. His dialogue, like that of many a contemporary writer, eschews inverted commas. Overall, he is dedicated to the cadences and caesuras, the music and lyricism, of well-wrought sentences and affecting paragraphs. It should therefore come as no surprise that, before spending the best part of two decades as a poet, he trained first as a classical singer. It is out of this continuum that the musicality of What Belongs to Youand Cleanness leaps.
