Cleanness

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.