Greenwell displays an extraordinary skill at handling time ... part of Sofia’s allure is that it is disintegrating, as Bulgaria itself is failing ... Greenwell’s version of Sofia sometimes allows him to isolate his characters in a densely made monochrome. He can remove them from any natural hinterland, cover them in mystery and then allow them to emerge into a scrupulously modulated clarity ... Greenwell’s book is a sort of wistful paean to the place where his protagonist lived in uneasy exile, or learned to grow up, or both ... bravura writing ... While he writes about sex graphically, Greenwell uses a crisp style to disguise the fact that he is really attempting to chart the characters’ complicated emotional needs ... The reader begins each new story with concern for the main character; he is like one of those young men in 19th-century French fiction setting out to receive his sentimental education.
[Greenwell's] mouths do not kiss or meet, but tend to greedily suck at each other, tasting themselves. Windpipes are taut, anuses are silky, flesh is relentlessly sniffed, and pages are heavy with sweat ... The instability of desire, the uncertainty of who we are — these are Greenwell’s major themes. ‘[W]e can never be sure of what we want,’ the narrator says, echoing R., ‘I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.’ This is not just a concept — the rattling and opaque machinery of desire — but a formal condition. Commas and semicolons conspire to form breathless strings of clauses that fold back on themselves, and a total absence of quotation marks in dialogue often leaves the reader groping: Who is speaking? What do they really want? Can we ever understand? ... In these stories, Greenwell does not really analyse or anatomise desire; he narrates its unfolding: the play-by-play shifts of power and lust; the coiling of memory, suffering, and pleasure. It amounts to one of the more stunning accounts of sex in literature ... We should be grateful for the narrator’s surfeit. There is already enough coolness and restraint in contemporary fiction. Many writers want to affect or feel on the page, stroking themselves; Cleanness does the alternative job of arguing for sweet excess. Greenwell doesn’t indulge in sap but makes a claim for it: the baroque prose, the long switchback Jamesian sentences, the indiscriminate tenderness toward all things — humans, dogs, ruins. It’s an instructive potency. One puts the book down, and the light feels a bit hotter and the heart stings more sharply.
... incandescent ... Anyone who read Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (2016), knows that his writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage ... There’s a moral quality to these extended sessions. In bed is where Greenwell’s men work out and reveal the essences of their personalities ... Carnal moments are accelerants; they’re where Greenwell’s existential and political themes are underlined, then set ablaze ... a better, richer, more confident novel. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. It’s a novel in search of ravishment ... Greenwell is a sensitive writer about the student-teacher relationship ... Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata ... This novel’s second half is not quite the equal of its first. Some scenes end rather than resolve. Greenwell is a brooder. You begin to wonder how his humorlessness will wear over time ... Yet there are no failures of equilibrium. This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.
... exquisite ... Greenwell displays a precocious ability to take readers into his narrator's mind and body ... Greenwell submerges readers in the bedroom, sharing his protagonist's intense attractions and doubts ... expertly rendered flashbacks ... Greenwell's backward glance, humming with insight. The book traverses an arc that is part heartbreaking and part forward looking ... Greenwell's prose sings, even as much of the music occurs in the rests. This writer understands beauty and loss, sorrow and hope, his fluid writing making the telling seem effortless.
... an arresting novel ... an electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves. The book arrives amid a wave of mainstream interest in the erotic lives of gay men, but its frank exploration of kink, loneliness, shame, and dark pleasures hearkens back to a less carefree period—as though to restore a charge of risk and consequence to queer sex in the era of corporate pride and Call Me by Your Name ... self-reflexive in outlook, as concerned with the purpose of passion as with its fulfillment ... The book’s sex scenes unfold like revelations, effortlessly braiding inner drama with precisely choreographed intimacy. Greenwell’s long, luxuriously becomma’d sentences, always on the edge of ending, create a tension receptive to the lightest touch: a shift in rhythm, or one clause’s tiny revision of its predecessor, can entirely alter the chemistry of a scene. He melds an incantatory cadence with the catechistic language of porn, which is ridiculous until you’re 'lit up with a longing that makes it the most beautiful language in the world' ... Bulgaria itself provides a less stimulating backdrop. Too often, Greenwell aligns the narrator’s angst with its vaguely sketched political malaise, as though the nation, too, feels trapped between a repressive status quo and libidinal chaos ... Despite his seven years in Bulgaria, the narrator remains a self-conscious interloper, and the scene a perfunctory engagement with circumstances that might have added dimension to Greenwell’s otherwise intimately powerful work.
Three of these nine stories have appeared in the New Yorker — and almost all of them are extraordinary. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes ... Greenwell is repeatedly drawn to precarious moments of emotional transition, particularly in regards to romantic attachment and erotic compulsion ... The intimate physical detail of this disturbing story will exceed some readers’ tolerance, but that’s entirely Greenwell’s point ... But Cleanness is not unrelentingly bleak. Indeed, the range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound ... incomparably bittersweet ... Fortunately, it almost feels too late or at least superfluous to celebrate the fact that this remarkable collection will not be shunted away to a back shelf for 'Gay & Lesbian Literature' ... brilliant.
... moving and wholly convincing depictions of giddy new romance and blissful, near-religious lovemaking ... The middle of 'The Little Saint' was the only time reading Greenwell that I ever got bored ... If the reader is a woman, she is likely to find confirmation of what makes so many of her gender wary of men and sex...how, when one man wants another man to feel totally humiliated and debased, to feel like the worst thing, like dirt, like less than dirt, like nothing but a hole, he calls that man she. Ah, the sameness of it all ... There is no irony in Greenwell’s writing, and—for me, regrettably—no comic touch. But one of the things I most admire is the quality of intense earnestness that marks every page. Laying himself bare, putting himself so mercilessly on the line, subjects the protagonist to the risk of appearing self-absorbed, shameful, exhibitionistic, and, of course, ridiculous. But that risk is surely part of the point: it is what makes writing like this worth doing ... Some of the most affecting and beautiful scenes in his books have nothing to do with sexual identity or gay desire but involve exquisite observations about others whose vulnerability has touched the narrator’s heart ... Each of these scenes is radiant with kindness, and, for me, reading them was like a balm. Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power ... I was happy reading Greenwell. The carefully constructed sentences, the authenticity of the voice, the clarity and deep humaneness of the gaze—all this had a soothing and uplifting effect on me, the usual effect of good literature. Coming to the end of Cleanness, I was already thinking about Greenwell’s next book, knowing that I would read anything he wrote.
Greenwell, whose beautiful writing is matched by his self-awareness, and has now written his second book novelizing his time spent in Bulgaria as a teacher. Yet, while the two novels share a setting, a protagonist, and overlapping history, Cleanness is a blossoming for Greenwell, who exhibits peaks here only hinted at in the preceding What Belongs To You. Cleanness is far and away one of the most evocative and sobering novels I’ve read in a long time, in which Greenwell manages to write about sex and violence, love and distance, and the feeling of home and language itself, in a way that feels immediately intimate and insightful ... In a climate of literary fiction that seems inundated with autofiction, Greenwell manages to stand out. His writing in Cleanness is more Cusk than Knausgaard, in more ways than one ... the distance Greenwell creates by cleverly calling into question his own memories of an event versus what he assumes transpired 'in actuality,' down to the word choices used—especially in translation from Bulgarian to English—reveals a complexity only enhancing the nuance of his narrator ... It’s difficult to find another writer, within autofiction or outside of it, that shows as much courage and understanding as Greenwell. His strength is in laying himself bare, and writing in a way that few dare to do ... a sublime book, transcending not only autofiction or LGBTQ writing, but the very barrier between stories and novel, fiction and non-fiction.
The way [Greenwell] parses an awkward conversation or a drunken night on the town or the most intimate erotic encounters is absolutely spellbinding. Even when his candor on carnal matters — specifically, homosexual matters — plunges deep into sadomasochistic territory, his interpretation of what’s going on between his characters is so savvy and precise that you can’t help admiring its elegance ... exquisite in its handling of what for many readers will be taboo territory ... [the narrator's] urge toward self-obliteration is unnerving (HIV contagion is an active possibility), but for readers willing to accompany him on his dive into abandon, the payoff is an intense suspense as to where he’ll draw a line ... Greenwell is a marvelous outward observer, too, and his narrator’s portrait of his Bulgarian surroundings is remarkably vivid. His students’ debate over whether to stay in Bulgaria or flee their country for better opportunities abroad has a poignant urgency ... If Greenwell continues in this vein, it will be fascinating to see how he tackles his alter ego’s experiences on the home front.
The beauty of Garth Greenwell’s sentences belies the disfiguring forces they harbor. As a writer, he is something like a poet-flagellant, suited to painful, precarious states; exquisite hungers and humiliations; the papered-over chasms of desire. Like the work of Jean Genet before him, Greenwell transforms individual appetites into expressions of unlikely commonality. His fictions depict moments of epiphanic desperation—shame, pleasure, remorse, and ecstasy—in which the mysteries of spirit and flesh are rendered briefly legible ... Greenwell is not only a poet of infinite longing and humiliated flesh. There are also moments of almost unbearable gentleness in Cleanness, sentences that feel like pressing on soft tissue ... The extraordinary force of melancholy in Cleanness arises not only from the slow dissolution of the narrator’s relationship with R., but also—perhaps even more forcefully—its bleak assessment of the compatibility between love and eros ... Here is that rare thing, the prose style that effectively sensitizes its readers to the experience of living with and through the consciousness it contains. We are initiated into particular ways of seeing and being, of living with art, with love, with lack, the aperture widening as we grow used to the light. Even if one were to—foolishly—leave aside the richness and ambivalence of its transgressive scrutiny, the aesthetic achievement of Cleanness alone would signal virtuosity.
Cleanness, which can be read as either a collection of nine discrete stories, a group of linked stories, or a novel tout court...is a very different and differently satisfying enterprise. ... formal restlessness can now be understood as a signal trait of Greenwell’s fiction, a mix of daring and doubt over the shapes a novel might take, a daring and doubt that embodies the subject that he has, no less daringly, been making his own ... For Greenwell has been seeking, along with a form and through a subject, a style in which the physical and emotional complications of sexual need, in his case between young men, might be set down ... What I have been moved to see, in Greenwell’s new book, is how that struggle with style has itself been subordinated into the wrestle with his subject, serving it newly and more richly than before. His sentences have leaned out, and have made room for a clearer, and truly revelatory, presentation of physical and psychosexual interplay ... In the most moving section of Cleanness, 'The Little Saint,' the narrator meets a man online and allows himself to assume the dominant role in their encounter ... It is intensely moving, the most sophisticated fiction Greenwell has produced. And it also reads as an allegory for the path his fiction has pursued: one that asserted a power that was performance, the mask now fallen away to reveal a face that is open, and afraid.
Greenwell is a writer unusually attuned to paradox and reversal ... Less a sequel than an expansion in both physical and mental space, Cleanness repeats, and makes more intricate, the triptych structure of What Belongs to You ... The narrator’s quest for self-knowledge seems to intensify in moments of intimacy, and Greenwell’s erotic prose is notably explicit and lucid, shorn of decorous metaphor ... Greenwell depicts—and addresses head-on—a present in which the pornographic imagination has thoroughly colonized our image banks. At a time when videos of every conceivable kink and fetish are freely available, there is something both quaint and thrilling about Greenwell’s implicit argument that the most meaningful intervention when it comes to representations of the sex act lies in the realm of written pornography ... Greenwell’s sex scenes exert an incongruous meditative attention on experiences characterized by impulse and abandon. In so doing, they effectively slow down time, dilating the moment to accommodate philosophical reverie and the intricate workings of erotic logic. Few writers have ever illuminated quite so clearly the role of anticipatory fantasy in sex as well as the often divergent reality ... It is to be expected that a book this rigorously confined to a single headspace would foster a mood of overwhelming loneliness. The narrator tries repeatedly to assuage this feeling, and his attempts, whether effective or not, are always moving.
... 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.
What further unites the books is Mr. Greenwell’s distinctive grammatical signature of connecting independent clauses with comma splices...Though the sentences are run-ons, their parts have been carefully balanced so as to achieve a sense of equilibrium—a syntactical cleanness—that contrasts with the narrator’s disorderly emotions ... Yet Mr. Greenwell’s stylistic accomplishment can only do so much to compensate for his books’ essential self-absorption. Sofia continues to be a vaguely exotic backdrop for the narrator’s escapades, a motif rather than a setting. And though R. is treated more tenderly than the street hustler patronizingly portrayed in What Belongs to You, he’s still fundamentally a cipher, the archetypal beautiful foreigner who always seems to be available to carpetbagging Americans, straight or gay. CleannessRead Full Review >>
I could have read Cleanness in a day ... it’s hard to put down. But I was doing what I sometimes do with lovers; I was taking my time with it because I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to savor every word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter, and I wanted to love the body of that book, the way Greenwell’s characters love each other’s bodies ... The book seems to ask us, in subtle, erotic, beautifully honest ways, what it means to traffic in...roles and how none of them quite ever fit because we are all so much more fluid than they allow us to be ... I haven’t ever read anything like this; it’s tender and rough, slow and fast, hot and scary, and when I finished it I held it to my heart in gratitude to see kink laid bare, sex and violence made manifest for all of us to see, and in awe of what it must have taken to write it.
His voluptuously long sentences owe something to Henry James ... Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating. What distinguishes him is an ability to make sex on the page genuinely dramatic, by integrating its motions and sensations into the established stakes of the narrative. There is a very profound sequence of this kind in the middle section of Cleanness ... Greenwell allows us to perceive how personal history courses through every gesture ... If the book is imagined as a body, then cleanness—a total lack of shame in putting sexual passion on the page—is what it achieves in these refreshing depictions. In one brilliant passage, Greenwell even redeems pornographic language itself[.]
His fiction deals in exquisite perceptions and equivocal moods, and is constantly alert to emotional nuance ... One result of all these second thoughts is that we gain a much fuller understanding of the person thinking them. Greenwell’s sex scenes are remarkable in capturing what’s at stake for his narrator beyond an obvious physical pay-off ... But this psychological realism, along with the fussiness of expression...and insistence on clarity of detail...means that the porno set-ups lack porno swagger ... The tone is that of someone contending with matters of enormous moral heft. In What Belongs to You, the earnestness suited the somewhat harrowing plot, but here, when the subject matter is more varied, it starts to feel like a limitation, a prose style that paints happiness and heartache in the same shade of blue. The issue is one of sensibility: Greenwell is squeamish about joining in with his characters’ fun. When he praises Hollinghurst or O’Hara, it’s telling he doesn’t mention their humour. Comedy has no place in his credo about art.
There is something unifying about Greenwell’s prose: long, rhythmic sentences run into each other, with grammar used to build and propel. Rather than break out of prose, speech is contained within. The fabric of Cleanness is textured and multi-faceted—Greenwell’s evocations of human experience are accurately conflicted: desire, shame and love rise again and again ... Greenwell is a master of precision: everyday intimacy is so well wrought that it can feel unbearable to read, as if he cuts too close to the skin. A book’s greatest achievement is often seen as the moment when the reader recognises a part of themselves that they hadn’t yet verbalised. Greenwell’s writing achieves this effortlessly, but in Cleanness he gives something more. In the warmth that rises through his prose there is a poignant optimism. It leaves the reader with the hope that it might spread.
Greenwell writes with a meticulous attention to detail ... An understated but nonetheless unnerving aspect of Cleanness is the presence in the background of various reactionary elements. At one point, the narrator hears of an activist group that had announced an LGBT film festival, which was ultimately disrupted by homophobic violence ... Greenwell’s approach is particularly distinctive in this respect: he’s fond of sentences that enumerate details and offer a sense of an ever-flowing narrative. But this isn’t a three-volume novel; instead, it weighs in at just over two hundred pages in length. This baroque prose style and the concise manner in which the narrative unfolds are seemingly at odds—but also beg the question of what else has been left out? This is, after all, a novel in which every character carries with them a sense of mystery and is fundamentally unknowable ... As earned endings go, it’s thoroughly unexpected, yet also perfectly resonant. Given all that’s come before, that seems entirely appropriate.
The most hotly anticipated queer title of the new decade (though it is only January, dear), Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness offers a familiarly impressive follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2016 debut novel, What Belongs to You ... Greenwell’s movement into short fiction...has provided him the space to write what he wants and, for the most part, to give his readers what they want ... It is hard to think of another contemporary gay writer who so assiduously searches out the (im)possibility of belonging somewhere, of belonging to someone or something, to a couple or community that might heal the deep rifts of loneliness and alienation ... What Greenwell leaves us with is a powerful desire for belonging that is always and everywhere frustrated, the perennial plight of the transnational queer or, a bit larger, a statement about how the realization of our desires to belong to others (and to have others belong to us) must always be deferred, incomplete, impossible. Keeping those wounds open, while gesturing at the possibility of transformation, is one of the signal achievements of Cleanness, and Greenwell’s writing more generally ... With Greenwell, we are lucky to be at the beginning, with the end still many more volumes to come.
One quality of this extraordinary novel is the way its intensities echo across chapters, flaring up in the life of one character and then another, crossing chasms of experience, illuminating new perspectives ... The novel is full of beautiful writing about the pitfalls of teaching, the violence of politics, and the purpose of poetry, but the sex scenes are the most memorable. Few writers write about sex so well and with so much sensitivity. The brilliance and animal warmth of Greenwell's style, the depth of insight, and the range of empathy, confer on even gloomy subjects a kind of radiance ... One of the book's many achievements is the way it dramatizes the paradoxes of men, the glowing anxieties they carry and conceal, and the way that roles (in sex, in society) have the power to trap or liberate them.
... a carnal triumph ... [Greenwell] bring[s] to these experiences the kind of attentiveness one only feels at the threshold of something ending and something beginning ... the narrator feels at home in language and in his sexuality, which Greenwell writes like no other living writer, slowing down heightened experiences enough to transcribe them. He moves breathlessly between physical touch and interior feeling, giving voice to shame, 'exquisite' pleasure and everything in between. He withholds nothing, and is almost surgical in his examination of the narrator’s psyche, but nothing about his writing is clinical — it is silken and warm and abundant ... Page after page, Greenwell fearlessly confronts the messiness of sex and desire: how easily pleasure slips into cruelty and back again, the thin threshold between shame and pleasure, how quickly one abandons consent in pursuit of pleasure, eclipsing even self-imposed limits ... The language around desire never loses emotional depth, even as it moves between different registers, from Hallmark-sweet to corrosive.
Greenwell’s connection to beauty, as an abstraction that is essential and inescapable, bears highlighting. His novel is about beautiful men and, more importantly, the ready-to-erupt violence that bubbles under their surface ... Greenwell’s prose is lyrically brutal and filled with anger, regret, disappointment, and, mostly importantly, eros. Greenwell is a master at writing about longing, but is also expert at navigating emotionally fraught sex scenes that can quickly descend into scenes of detachment, alienation, and violence; Cleanness is devastating ... Greenwell leaves the decision to his reader. He avoids being preachy, and the result is that his characters feel lived-in, and less like caricatures. Having complex, perhaps ambivalent characters whose likability may be questioned, ultimately, is a more powerful tool for proffering pathos than, say, producing more classically constructed, unambiguous, clearly motivated characters ... This is a remarkable novel whose prose is both original and insightful. Though there are moments that recall the classics, Greenwell proves to be such a master of the form that it’s almost as if he invented it. He takes the trope of revisiting a past love on the heels of possible new romances and spins it on top of itself; this is more than a romance. This is a novel about human suffering, and the complexities of making connections amongst ourselves.
Garth Greenwell...masterfully employs the art of explicit, empathetic description as a way of theorizing sex. Indeed, his latest novel, Cleanness, posits sex as central to life. Here, Greenwell challenges readers to see how the pleasures of sex, especially for queer people, can be foreclosed by what Rubin called the 'erotic injustice' of shame. Yet he also shows how sex might be an act of difficult but healing care ... Cleanness defies easy summary ... it challenges us to feel resonances, to trace patterns, and to navigate shifts in scale between the narrator’s personal history and the political history of Bulgaria, his adopted home ... the nuance of Greenwell’s writing is astonishing. Here we have one of the truly great modern writers of sex, and this is not because his sex scenes are always sexy—though they are often that, too ... Greenwell’s greatness as a writer of sex—his keen, graphic, thrilling attention to bodies, orifices, fluids, and sensations—is not straightforwardly pornographic; it is also attuned to how emotional needs and power struggles play out in the sexual scenario ... a narrative of radical caring, a study of the mutual care that might exist beyond the mere payment of debts and the fulfillment of obligations. The book develops an image of care that is tested and enacted—sometimes finding rapturous expression, sometimes falling apart under the burdens of the uncaring past—in sex, in collective protest, and perhaps even in pedagogy.
Prudish readers be warned: the sex scenes in Cleanness are unhurried and officiously thorough ... Greenwell writes with great acuity about interpersonal chemistry, from the thrill of holding hands in public spaces (in a country where homophobic attacks are not uncommon) to the ritualism of S&M, which is rendered here as a kind of performance – a dance of self-negation and withholding ... He refrains from using speech marks in dialogue, and frequently deploys comma splices where others might have gone with a semi-colon or a fresh sentence...Such gimmicks can often feel contrived, but Greenwell’s storytelling is so consistently engaging, and his sentences so immaculately weighted, that they succeed in imbuing the prose with a sense of suppleness and momentum ... The novel’s title signposts its preoccupation with moral fastidiousness ... We’ve seen this trope elsewhere, in novels like Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians: a character who likes it rough, or is otherwise sexually atypical, is revealed to have been a victim of physical or sexual violence. Readers of such books must grapple with a similar dilemma to that faced by Greenwell’s characters: by treating this cause-and-effect formulation as a self-evident existential truth, we implicitly reinforce reactionary notions of sexuality that pit the normal (wholesome, clean) against the deviant (damaged, defective, squalid), perpetuating stigma and shame. Cleanness explores this bind with bracing candour, and comes down – just about – on the side of a generous agnosticism: 'There’s no fathoming pleasure . . . nothing we can imagine is beyond it.'
[Greenwell's] writing is precise and fastidious, but it often describes unfinished or contingent thoughts, as though ideas were forever rehearsing themselves within his sentences. Here there’s a sense in which the narrator’s own striving – for the articulation of a vision, or a feeling to fit his thesis – is at least as important as what he’s looking at ... Not quite a novel, it is nonetheless a tightly structured book, eschewing chronological order in favour of a careful symmetry in which each story, apart from the central one, is mirrored by its thematic opposite ... Greenwell has spoken about the way gay sex can create private spaces amid public ones: the cruising spots in a city in which sexual activity goes on under the noses of straight society. His prose is like that too, at once inviting you in and holding you at arm’s length. The combination of intimacy and distance that characterises his writing is echoed in descriptions of sexual encounters, often with strangers, in which the line between desire and fear is so fine as to be invisible ... Greenwell charts clear-sightedly the delicate balance between wilful will-lessness and true powerlessness, which is for the narrator the main attraction of the experience ... Greenwell was a poet before he became a novelist, and the namelessness of the characters gives Cleanness the feel of a lyric poem, at once confessional and anonymous. The anonymity creates a space for biographical speculation, leaving you wondering whether you’re reading journal entries rather than fiction, and exactly whose propriety is being protected by those blank initials. But the ambiguity and lack of characterisation creates a problem too. Because everything is channelled through the mind of a single narrator, the book becomes, at times, overwhelmingly solipsistic ... the narrator has more words than he has perceptions or ideas, and the world he moves through appears far simpler than he wants it to be ... Fantasy, unconscious desire, the roles we are forced to perform by love: on all this, Cleanness is wise and illuminating, and Greenwell is clearly a talented writer of beautiful sentences, and an insightful guide to the strange ways people have of loving each other. But despite some astonishing and unsettling moments, this is a profoundly humourless book. Need sex always be so portentous? Need life?
...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.
... deliver he does. This is no sophomore slump. Though it could be considered a sequel, and maybe that is what it’s meant to be, both the writing and stories told are an elevation of what preceded. An expansion. And a strong one at that ... For a book called Cleanness, there is a lot of glorious dirt in its pages–both real and metaphorical ... The author, though, could also be referring to the manner in which he writes–precise, unfussy, clutter-free ... There was much chatter about the sex-scenes in the first book–of the world he described there, anonymous sex in public places. The ones in this novel are on another level altogether. No description or emotion is softened, or minimized. Their frankness unsparing ... The sex scenes can be uncomfortable, sometimes very much so, but they are also titillating, joyful, a turn on, and also a turn off. Greenwell uses these scenes as places of self discovery ... Greenwell returns again and again to the power of carnal wants and exposes them as confusing, exciting, infuriating, relentless, and wonderful emblems to our humanity. You may find yourself wanting to judge the characters for their blatant actions and needs, but a turn of phrase, a word, a simple description placed ever so gently and matter-of-factly will change your perception. As a reader, I recalled some unconventional, perhaps frowned upon desire that I once craved, or acted upon, and my judgment of the characters was altered with empathy. Greenwell takes wayward longing and makes it a unifying force.
Cleanness, which shares the same narrator as What Belongs To You without explicitly harkening back to its antecedent, is at least partly about love, but doesn’t always feel like it ... In this magnificently controlled book, Greenwell places himself in a queer canon that is at some remove from the queer men coming of age more recently. Longing for a reckless display of queer desire, fumbling with whether or not to wear a condom—it is all familiar, and Greenwell renders it beautifully here. More importantly, though, it is deeply radical to reclaim the 'filthy' spaces of queer longing, to find, again, the guilt or the complicity in the violence enacted by one queer man on another, all things that feel more and more excised from queer writing. A diffusion of queer communion has occurred. Away from the bathhouses and cruising gardens, modern queer literature tends to be overly virtuous, far too straight; yet inside them, such writing can appear outdated. Somehow, Cleanness avoids all that. It is both painful plea and wise instruction ... Together Cleanness’ nine stories reclaim the somewhat-forgotten element of dangerous power struggle that used to more frequently define queerness. Greenwell puts the queer man back into his simultaneously alive and desolate landscape of desire—the one many of us have a hard time remembering in more scrubbed versions of queerness ... Cleanness wants to hum at a frequency the reader must tune to catch. And it does.
...a book of passionate intensity with a facade of emotionless calm. The book’s interior is deep, dark, forlorn, and afraid; its exterior is cool, distant, and grey—perfectly reflecting the city in which it is set. It draws its readers into a state of calm before unloading an almost unbearable emotional weight on us. Cleanness is not an easy book to enjoy; it is a paradox of style and substance. But it is, nonetheless, a small masterpiece ... With incredible frequency, Cleanness behaves less like a story being told and more like a four-dimensional experience that we are thrown into and must live through. By the end, though there is little catharsis, we have nonetheless survived, and we should feel glad for it ... Cleanness is not a novel that could be called lyrical or even beautiful. Like Sofia itself, it is brutalist and cold, but filled with intense emotion and artistry. There is so much disquiet fuelling our protagonist and his story, and we feel every moment of it. There’s love here, though it is often felt from afar; while the fear and the trepidation—the rare moments of confident assertion—these are all felt with assuredness and complete gravity. Though our protagonist is often at war with himself and holds himself back from the world around him, living with him is a theatrical and exhausting experience, and one that forces a greater engagement between reader and character than most literature could possibly hope to achieve. In short, Cleanness is a masterpiece of characterisation and storytelling.
... a book which is not quite a novel ... the way Greenwell writes the wind, it is about so much more than weather, an embodiment of the inhospitable world a queer person so often finds themself in ... In Greenwell’s eroticism, the reader as spectator is invited inside the frame to find that the body is not the central object, but the objects by which the people—in the totality of their beings—are fully realized.
Greenwell’s writing on language, desire, and sex in all their complex choreography vibrates with intensity, reading like brainwaves and heartbeats as much as words. Concerned with intimacy, its performance, and the inevitability of becoming and being oneself, this is in every way an enriching, deepening follow-up.
...a deeper excavation of the sordid ballet of human desire and a fresh dose of his incisive investigations of social and sexual alienation ... An episodic narrative told in clean slices that resemble self-contained short stories, Cleanness has a familiarly autofictional capsule structure ... The analytical distance that opens up in the prose is par for the course in Cleanness, as the narrator’s experiences are refracted again and again through the lenses of place and time ... Greenwell is obsessed with the periodicity of personal desire—the way age brings with it a categorizing of passions, a sifting of old loves down into sedimentary layers of intensity. This in turn adds an air of antiquity to the self, extending back as it does discretely into the past; it’s why the book can feel at once so perilously modern and so coolly baroque, and why a Sebaldian melancholy seems at times to waft up like a fog through the spaces in Greenwell’s lovingly turned sentences ... a curious, hypervigilant distance is always present in Greenwell’s writing, a product of the nascent fear of exploitation that pervades his writing and of his desire to schematize the passions. The relatively cool and collected narration of the book is essentially an attempt to view the flames of desire through a pane of tinted glass ... Which isn’t to say the book isn’t frequently and unbearably lovely ... What makes Cleanness so astonishing to read is Greenwell’s ability to discover again and again, in the midst of the calamitous storm of love, these moments of paradoxical calm.
It’s those rules of engagement that seem to intrigue Greenwell most; the intoxicating and almost painful honesty of his unflinching gaze on desire ... B+.
Greenwell is an exquisite writer who can capture a scene with great nuance or evoke an emotion with depth and power. In this ultimately inner-facing work, he maps the landscapes of the heart through the pleasure and pain of relationships and the intersections of love and violence ... Covering similar emotional ground, this heartfelt work is a worthy successor to Greenwell’s extraordinary debut.
No contemporary writer I know of conveys desire better than Garth Greenwell. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, is an audacious wonder, whose nine stories of intensely textured personal interactions form an unusually hard to define novelistic whole. The book is an argument against convention, both structurally and on the character level—the melding of forms makes Cleanness feel both unique and familiar as it explores the boundaries of longing and the turbulence of love ...
I should mention up top how good Cleanness’s sex scenes are. Shatteringly hot. I was never sure if I should hide the book from people next to me on the subway or lend it to them ... Cleanness most brilliantly captures the way that love can sometimes cause us to cherish even oblivion. Because desire obliterates reason—and in so doing it can alter our self-perception, our long-established limits. This process of undoing is one of literature’s fundamental elements, and it’s what gives Greenwell’s highly specific work an underpinning that is consciously, cannily, canonical.
...at its best—and in this book’s finest passages—the genre can be searingly immediate and authentic. Mr Greenwell’s prose has a confiding timbre, alternating between prosaic and lyrical. The wind seems to whisper that 'all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbours'. Light that comes through a restaurant window is muted, 'as if steeped in tea'. The author’s greatest strength, though, lies in his unblinking exploration of the chemistry of lust and mysteries of desire, both thwarted and exhausted ... Mr Greenwell insists that though such passions may be opaque, they should not be marginalised or denied. In his writing, he is determined to treat raw sexual instincts—'to want something and not question it'—as a major factor in human affairs, dignifying the body’s needs as the first step towards meaningful connection. To some readers, the explicit sex in his new book might seem gratuitously provocative. Yet the theme beneath the flesh is powerful and subtle: a quest for the kind of intimacy which, rather than confirming a lover’s identity, upends it.
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.
Greenwell is fearless about getting to the murky bottom of things. A signature skill is his ability to draw out the seemingly opposed impulses of intimate experience ... Cleanness is a dangerous book, not because it is explicit, but because it lingers in ambivalence – fully stretching and searching for the potential in uncertain pleasures and connections. It offers little resolution, but many moments of intensity, happiness, solidarity, belonging, and the kind of forward momentum that comes from tracking existence in its most honest contradictions.
In lean, uncluttered language, Greenwell tells messy, lush stories ... It could be argued that every story is really about the narrator. He is our filter for all the other perspectives, and his narrative shapes theirs. Memory and art are making something durable out of experiences most notable for comings, goings and chaos.
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 ...
Garth Greenwell’s writing is the kind of writing that is so crisp and haunting, so elegiacally beautiful, that it is immediately claimed by the literary mainstream. Surely prose so intelligent and introspective, so worldly and relatable, must transcend categorization? Surely it must belong to everyone? It doesn’t ... The joy of reading Greenwell – for this reader, at least – is how magnificently gay it is ... Greenwell’s fiercely sexy new novel Cleanness is something gay readers won’t want to share. After centuries of reading about the sexual conquests of straight men, Greenwell’s peeling away of the layers of desire, confusion, evolution and role-playing that accompany the gay sexual experience is revelatory for the gay reader.
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.
In his new book Cleanness, a series of stories structured in three tidy parts of three chapters each and so tightly linked one could call it a novel, Greenwell applies the unique pressure of sex on scene and character, as he says, to drive the narrative ... One could read Greenwell for the intimacies alone, the slowing and dissecting of human connection, the tiny cues between lovers ... But more important, I think, one goes to Greenwell to remember that we are not all clean, all dirty, all good, or all bad. He compels us to examine that which is monstrous inside us ... In a moment when so many of us are at work negotiating our right to take up space in a world that asks us to make ourselves small, Greenwell gives us a story of desire and shame so very specific as to be universal.
The brilliance and animal warmth of Greenwell's style, the depth of insight, and the range of empathy, confer on even gloomy subjects a kind of radiance ... One of the book's many achievements is the way it dramatizes the paradoxes of men, the glowing anxieties they carry and conceal, and the way that roles (in sex, in society) have the power to trap or liberate them.
To really write about sex – the way Greenwell does, stripping it down to raw detail, physical and emotional – is to engage with both the sublime and the mundane, the ecstasy and the jeopardy, the pleasure and the pain. Greenwell’s sex scenes combine tenderness with explicit detail ... Greenwell’s prose possesses the same luminescence, shimmering with emotional truth. Sex both unites and divides the characters in Cleanness. Where there is fear and secrecy, there is also love and intimacy. This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists.
...a slim but sensitive and elegantly written novel that packs a lot into a relatively small space ... Greenwell knows what he’s doing. We are placed in the middle of the narrator’s struggle with language, to articulate the kinds of longing he feels ... In Cleanness, this embrace of existential uncertainty enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator. In some ways, Greenwell is probing beyond what mere biographical facts would disclose. His deceptively smooth and lucid sentences suggest multitudes ... The exotic terrain (the author must have assumed that most readers wouldn’t know anything about Bulgaria) becomes an effective way to instigate the novel’s focus: the minute observation of interior shifts in mood.
The stories diverge a great deal in terms of subject matter but the intensity of the interior viewpoint is always compelling ... In both novels, Greenwell employs page-long paragraphs with no quotation marks for dialogue, which might be off-putting but isn’t - his style, which has something Germanic, or perhaps Bulgarian, about its cadences, is urgent and hypnotic and builds up to a climax, with multiple commas along the way, pulling back and pushing forward ... an almost Nicholson Baker-like exploration of sex and desire is central ...
Greenwell is a great stylist, with the tone and structure of his sentences shifting each time his central character changes position in the narrative ... In the final story the teacher enjoys a night out with two of his students before he leaves Sofia. The more he drinks, the more his professional and sexual boundaries melt away. He berates himself for his desire for one of the young men. But all his reflection and self-flagellation cannot assuage his guilt, or the reader’s sense that there is something deeply predatory about his behaviour. ‘I had leered at him, I had touched him, I had been a caricature of myself, I thought, but that isn’t true. I had been myself without impediment.' ... Greenwell recognises that even these darker proclivities exist somewhere on the spectrum of sexual desire and as such are part of who we are.
It’s true that Greenwell is right on-trend. But if Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk are supermodels in couture gowns from the grand fashion houses of 20th-century autofiction (WG Sebald, Thomas Bernhard), then Greenwell is a Topshop knock-off ... Characters are mostly just initials — R, N and so on — and visual details are kept to a tasteful minimum. None of the grubby business of making the world come alive on the page. Instead, it’s an honest, authentic, stripped-back look. The writerly equivalent of poured concrete and a jute rug ... It’s not enough to offer up scraps of a life and expect the reader to stitch them together ... The stand-out feature of Greenwell’s fiction is the detailed narration of brutal sexual encounters ... As soon as we’re out of the bedroom, though, watching the narrator walking around Sofia, the voltage plummets ... In theory it’s fine to write about yourself, or your students, or a train journey. A great writer can make anything interesting.
Writing about an American abroad in Europe follows a long tradition of course; but Henry James and Edith Wharton never wrote so beautifully about the “erotic grimaces” displayed on Bulgarian gay hookup apps ... Writing about an American abroad in Europe follows a long tradition of course; but Henry James and Edith Wharton never wrote so beautifully about the 'erotic grimaces' displayed on Bulgarian gay hookup apps ... Greenwell’s paragraphs will be studied for years. They are as thick as thighs, almost beckoning you as you turn the page. Looking at them you feel an almost sensual feeling as if you need to be between them to grasp their meaning. Pick out another work of fiction that you’ve read recently and compare the paragraphs. They most likely look manic compared to Greenwell’s. There is nothing abrupt in his writing, few single lines or interjections. Everything is enveloped. Somehow, I never thought I would be blushing at the shape of a paragraph, but here I am ... His writing translates fraught desire, that feeling almost impossible to describe, to something tangible ...
So much of queer life can be a suppressed striving for something more. Cleanness is an education then in the possibilities of queer expressiveness ...
We leave this book satisfied into silence from the astonishing prose offered before us.
The narrator pushes more sexual boundaries this time, and Greenwell admirably pushes them too by depicting those desires with an unflinching frankness ... portrayed in Greenwell’s precise, elegant style ... One of Greenwell’s talents is making everyday occurrences feel dramatic and full of ambivalence and nuance, but the scenes featuring the relationship at the heart of the novel suffer a bit in comparison to the dramatic sex depicted in other sections. Still, the simple beauty of the writing is something to behold ... Brave and beautiful.
Greenwell writes about sex as a mercurial series of emotional states and is lyrical and precise in his descriptions of desires and motivations he suggests are not subject to control or understanding. This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative.
