Ravethem.Interrogating the stories that gay men tell themselves about their love lives — and especially our most deeply held beliefs about human attachment, sexual freedom, and our worthiness for loving relationships — lies at the heart of Garth Greenwell’s stunning second novel ... Greenwell’s fearless, introspective stories probe the private regions of a gay man’s heart, whose unstable ground, rocked by seismic passions and deeply buried rage, is as likely to split open as to flower ... Greenwell is less invested in the chronology of...love than in depicting alternating leitmotifs of precaution and risk, desire and shame, annihilation and acceptance that together form the narrator’s complex private ethos ... In contrast to the narrator’s rigidly compartmentalized life, which often chafes against the limits of his roles as teacher and lover, Greenwell’s sentences run lush and loose in perfect fidelity to his narrator’s consciousness. This distinct style, which featured prominently in What Belongs to You, reaches virtuosic heights in Cleanness as Greenwell breaks with grammatical decorum ...
