Cleanness

This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative.

These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition.

Greenwell displays an extraordinary skill at handling time [...] It’s an exquisite piece of writing that uses a simple plaintive system to create a complex emotional effect.

Greenwell is a relentless truth-teller with a poet’s eye for detail and a shimmering prose style that’s reason enough to read the book

The stories in Cleanness are each a masterpiece. There is no pretension here, no dishonesty—be the subject matter sex or joy or vulnerability or the many meanings and consequences of human proximity. It’s difficult to explain just how much depth there is to Greenwell’s writing; suffice it to say there are things he accomplishes, emotional destinations he reaches in the course of a sentence that many other writers can’t get to over the course of a whole novel.

Masterful. Every little detail.

This is a remarkable novel whose prose is both original and insightful [...] Greenwell proves to be such a master of the form that it’s almost as if he invented it.

This writer understands beauty and loss, sorrow and hope, his fluid writing making the telling seem effortless.

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.

So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire as Garth Greenwell’s writing does. His sensibility is akin to James Baldwin’s, and he observes the world with eyes like those of Tolstoy. With shimmering prose and undiluted intensity, Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability.

Cleanness is an impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist― to fight

Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex―locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradation, sweetness, confusion, and rage. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison. His perfect noticing extends to the way we experience love and loneliness, the feeling of exile, and the eternal search for home

Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth.

In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn't know―until now―how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off―sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar―and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master.

Garth Greenwell’s sentences are magical and spellbinding. They breathe, and are alive, in completely unpredictable ways. Words are voyages, says John Donne. Greenwell is a novelist whose art makes a poet stand on his toes.

Garth Greenwell writes with remarkable power, vulnerability and an operatic beauty. What he leaves us with is an absolute truth – love is what drives us all towards light, towards any kind of redemption, but we must earn it, we must give all to it.

The book is explicitly—almost incandescently—erotic.

Greenwell charts the ferocity of desire in the most exquisitely controlled prose imaginable. You’ll be seeing this on many lists next year.

Melancholy and lyrical, this slim volume confirms that Greenwell is among our finest writers on sex and desire.

I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. These stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.

The simple beauty of the writing is something to behold.

Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.

An electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves [...] Intimately powerful. 

Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes.

The nine stories of Cleanness have the cohesion of a song cycle [...] there is a symmetry to their organization, with a life-altering love affair rippling out from the center.

Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth.

The way he parses an awkward conversation or a drunken night on the town or the most intimate erotic encounters is absolutely spellbinding.

If Henry James were alive in this strange century, if Thomas Mann had been allowed to write raw sex, if Virginia Woolf had slummed it more, if Proust had been born in Kentucky, if they all commingled their blood and brains, we might get something like Garth Greenwell. Cleanness lives between Europe and America, between novel and story, between fiction and the self. It is indescribable, and it is genius.

Greenwell writes about moments of nuance with unrelenting precision, seeking not to flatten them but to fan them out into an array displaying their every possible shade.

An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional, delight of a novel - Garth Greenwell writes like no one else.

Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning ... 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.

Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth.

A novel of devastating honesty and beauty. A gorgeous literary line runs from Death in Venice to Giovanni's Room to A Boy's Own Story to What Belongs to You, and, now, Cleanness, and I will follow it to the last word.

Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating ... A glorious, affirmative vision.

The second book from Garth Greenwell appears to feature the same unnamed narrator from his first — a gay American teacher living in the capital of Bulgaria. In nine interlinked stories, Greenwell dissects the expatriate’s relationships with his students, his sexuality and the city of Sofia in an aching examination of intimacy and power. As the narrator reflects on his time abroad before he returns home, Greenwell asks potent questions about how and why we long for love.

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.

No contemporary writer I know of conveys desire better than Garth Greenwell. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, is an audacious wonder.

In this gorgeous follow-up to 2016’s What Belongs to You, we once again spend some time with an unnamed American high school teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. There’s never much plot in Greenwell’s fiction, but that doesn’t matter. It’s Greenwell’s sentences that are the main attraction. His ability to write sex scenes that are deeply revealing and erotic and tender and illuminating is simply unmatched. Fall in love with his keen ear for language.

Something said by Elizabeth Hardwick, however, about reading Woolf’s The Waves—“I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful…. You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy”—captures my own similar experience reading Greenwell.

The interlinked stories circle notions of pleasure, violence, and the self. Greenwell is interested in the transformations that might be found in the loss of ego; he pursues the question through sadomasochistic flings, conducted against the crumbling backdrop of a once shining capital. In the book’s middle section, the narrator turns from alienation to joy, describing his relationship with a Portuguese student, R. Though the connection doesn’t last, being with R. feels like “a kind of cleanness,” Greenwell writes, in which one’s essence is not shattered but offered, intact, to the beloved: “Anything I am you have use for is yours.”