Small Rain

by Garth Greenwell

A writer’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Literary Fiction, LGBT, Contemporary, Audiobook, Novels

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2024

About the author

Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book. He is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the bestselling anthology KINK: Stories. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and Harper’s, among others. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Iowa City and New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.

Reviews

[Jack Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I realise a book is set during the pandemic my fight or flight response is triggered, but this book uses that context to discuss illness, mortality, poetry, art, and love in an incredibly intimate and soul-bearing way. Laid out on a hospital bed and fighting for his life, this character's precarious predicament facilitates total vulnerability.

The detailed descriptions of procedures and daily life in the ICU can be a little monotonous and menial after a while and it nearly lost me in the first 20 pages where it was all hospital-description, but once the character begins to meditate on life and its meaning this book really takes flight. If anything the juxtaposition of the harsh hospital lights, the needles, and the body's pain help to make the emotional rumination seem all the more soft and tender.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 2025
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2024
I just LOVE Garth Greenwell! He is an expert when in it comes to turning human consciousness into language, and in "Small Rain", he ponders the experience of suddenly becoming life-threateningly ill and being stuck in a hospital. The unnamed Kentucky-born narrator and protagonist is a writer who lives in Iowa City with his partner, a Spanish poet and professor named L (and you guessed it: It's an alter ego of Greenwell himself, L representing his partner Luis Muñoz). After feeling debilitating pain for days, L finally convinces him to seek medical help - and as it turns out, he suffers from infrarenal aortic dissection, a rare and dangerous occurrence: A tear in the main artery of the body. While doctors with various specialties spend weeks attempting to find the cause and containing the disease, our narrator feels helpless and scared, with all kinds of thoughts racing through his head. This experience of being separated from life is heightened by the fact that Covid is raging and the only person allowed to visit the narrator is L (who, naturally, is also terrified).

In a way, Greenwell gives us a chamber play, with a protagonist confined to a room he only leaves to undergo scans etc., and frequently even confined to his bed. Doctors and nurses come and go, some of them building caring, temporary relationships with their patient, but L is the only person connecting him to what he knows as normalcy, and his mind is haunted by the things that have constituted his life until now: We learn about his dysfunctional family and his love for his half-sister G, former mental and physical ailments, how he got from being a voice major to studying in Iowa where he met L, how they literally build a home together, stabilizing structures and weathering storms, but he also ponders the political situation in America as well as music and poetry.

One of the texts he analyzes is Westron Wynde, the lyrics to a 16th century song that contains the lines "Westron wynde when wyll thow blow / the smalle rayne downe can Rayne" - so that's where the novel's title stems from, a poem the narrator sees as "an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible", tricky but "more beautiful for it, for the difficulty". And that of course also goes for its sibling, this novel: It's puzzling and full of cracks, and the cracks are where Greenwell traditionally seeks meaning (do yourself a big favor and read Cleanness and What Belongs to You). Also, the book is a devotion to the mess we call life, and especially to L, who appears not as an idea or a metaphor, but as a three-dimensional, complex person.

What a wonderful, multi-faceted, deep text. Did I mention that I love Garth Greenwell?

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I avoid books that have anything to do with the pandemic, but this one proved that a medical emergency during COVID can be about other things than COVID. I think it helped that I've read Garth Greenwell's previous books, and the protagonist is the same character at another point in his life. I'm not sure how a reader new to this author will connect.

I do think this is the closest book that reminded me of an episode from ER or House, but with the patient as the main character. I'm still going to give it 4 stars because some moments didn’t keep my attention, including the one that inspired the title. But this is the book that made me realize Garth Greenwell is one of my favorite authors.

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Greenwell’s exceptionally-accomplished novel has autobiographical underpinnings, he’s adamant it be regarded as fiction, not autofiction – a genre he views as suspect perhaps because, for him, it blurs the boundaries between personal experience and the transfiguration of experience through art. Greenwell’s story's narrated by an unnamed man in the throes of a medical emergency, heralded by sudden, previously-unimaginable pain. But this emergency’s unfolding in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and the narrator’s more concerned with avoiding overflowing hospitals than seeking treatment. But when it’s clear this pain’s not going away, he’s forced to act. After hours in a dingy, crowded emergency room, it transpires the narrator’s aorta’s so damaged it’s a miracle he’s still alive, let alone still standing. But the explanation for his condition eludes him and his doctors. He’s an enigma that gives him near-celebrity status for the team of professionals rushing to his bedside.

And so, the narrator’s transplanted from the world of the living into a liminal space, the otherworldly territory of the sick. The pandemic means hospital visitors are restricted, so human contact’s primarily with medical staff: the outside’s only glimpsed through windows, so that a sighting of a sparrow perched on a nearby ledge becomes something marvellous. Isolation stirs a series of reflections: some based in memory, others in thoughts about a self the narrator can no longer take for granted. Outside, he’s a poet slowly building a reputation in literary circles, a southerner now living in Iowa City. A choice founded in his relationship with fellow poet L. who teaches there – L.’s character mirrors aspects of Greenwell’s own partner, poet Luis Muñoz. The bond between narrator and L., albeit shifting from earlier passion to comfortable domesticity, highlights the strangeness of being assigned a new identity as patient rather than person; subjected to intimate acts ‘stripped of intimacy,’ scrutinised, handled and assessed by a succession of strangers. Strangers in turn evaluated by the narrator: those who might provisionally act as friends; those who appear caring; those who seem closer to callous. All underlining the narrator’s incredible vulnerability: reduced to a mass of arteries, organs, and limbs that operate as junctions between his body and the machinery he now needs to function.

The narrator’s time’s punctuated by hospital routines and procedures with brief intervals created by L.’s daily visits. As time passes, the narrator retreats into meditations on the art and literature important to him. Small incidents set off fertile chains of association, as his doctors mentally dissect and parse his body, the narrator parses and dissects his favourite poems – the incomprehensible language of medicine countered by the known of literature. Two separate realms which first clash then slowly intersect - unlike the ongoing clashes between hospitals battling Covid and swathes of American society refusing to admit to its existence. A situation that angers and baffles the narrator whose analysis of his situation mingles with concerns about his society, a culture of distinctly ‘American unreason.’ The sense of being undone by his body parallels impressions of America as a ‘coming-apart country’ rife with conflict and falsities: racist policing; climate denial in the face of ongoing ecological devastation. So that Greenwell’s remarkably-convincing portrait of a body in crisis broadens into a compelling examination of contemporary America’s ills.

Although the narrator here clearly connects to the ones featured in Greenwell’s earlier novels, this works perfectly as a standalone piece. Greenwell’s influences are wide-ranging drawing on the so-called literature of illness including Virginia Woolf’s discussions of living with pain. For me there were echoes too of Mark Doty, Anne Boyer’s writings on cancer and capitalism, and Denton Welch grappling with hospitalisation after a catastrophic accident. Greenwell’s prose is disciplined, measured yet strangely hypnotic – as is his meticulously detailed account of his narrator’s medical treatments. But this is also a book about what might console and sustain in the face of overwhelming precarity: tenderness, the recognition, acceptance, and celebration of love. Greenwell’s dubbed it as above all a message to his partner Luis. Yet Greenwell’s narrative steers admirably clear of sentimentality, it’s fluid, gripping, relatable and, in its early stages, sometimes close to unbearably tense.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC

Rating: 4/4.5 rounded up

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel doesn't feel like any other novel, a very high compliment. It is strange to read a book that documents something so clearly and perfectly and realize that you cannot remember finding it in any other book or film. The something it documents is, broadly, how it feels to be in a hospital in America in the 21st century. But, of course, within that are so many other things. The fragility and strangeness of the body, the loss of autonomy and all the fear and anxiety that go with it, the ways your mind and your body can seem two entirely unconnected things, and the strangely specific world of a hospital in the summer of 2021.

A hospital is a place without privacy, without intimacy, and often there can be a near complete loss of the sense of self between physical suffering, medication, etc. Greenwell's novel, like his previous ones, follows an unnamed writer who is quite similar to Greenwell himself, though this time we are firmly in America, the writer lives in Iowa City with his longtime partner L, teaching and writing. His medical crisis is sudden and inexplicable, leaving him suddenly alone in the ICU waiting for a resolution, thrown into a limbo state of not being able to eat or walk or sleep or even think all that clearly some of the time. In the novel, we sometimes follow every little detail of his interactions with a doctor or nurse, we sometimes follow his thoughts as they move through time. It is not a novel with chapter breaks or any breaks, really (an artistic choice I respect given the way everything bleeds together but which makes this a very hard book to read before bed!) without a real plot.

In the past, I have been surprised at how much I enjoy Greenwell's writing. Books with little plot and more of an emphasis on prose are often not my style. In his previous two novels what really won me over was the queer life and sex. In this book there is very little sex (maybe a normal amount for a normal novel, but his novels have never been normal when it comes to sex in the best way) but I still found myself captivated. Perhaps because sex is just the body and so much of this book is about the body.

Greenwell writes very realistic fiction, and here he depicts so specifically a time and place, the fears and joys of it, that it often feels less like a novel and more like you are actually present as it all unfolds. It's a truly impressive and important work, feels like something I would put in a time capsule as a way to communicate what it feels like to be alive right now.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not a spoiler to state that there is exactly one sex scene in ‘Small Rain’. It is awkward and unfulfilling, which I suppose makes it a prototypical Greenwell sex scene. But there is a tenderness that is also uniquely Greenwell, in this novel which is perhaps the most intimate and revealing he has yet written.

Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker of 9 September, in a review beautifully entitled ‘An Anatomist of Pleasure Gives Voice to the Body in Pain’, writes: Pain, it has been said, is the great censor, the eater of words. Pain shatters language; it remains untranslatable—not just anti-narrative but pre-narrative, calling us back to our first sounds.

Things are not going well for our eponymous narrator from Greenwell’s previous two books, who ends up in hospital with a rare vascular condition. His immigrant partner, known only as L, is stricken with worry and left to deal with the old house they are renovating as a couple. (The decrepit house could be a metaphor for the narrator’s damaged and stubborn body.)

Our narrator, who taught poetry in Bulgaria for a stint, is now a teacher at a college in Iowa. What keeps him going through the excruciating pain of his ‘infrarenal aortic dissection’ are memories of favourite poems, art, language. The title of the book comes from: “Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The small rayne downe can Rayne, a sentence with a broken back.”

One of the most stunning setpieces in the book, the setting of which is largely confined to the narrator’s hospital bed, is his recollection of teaching a poem – a true masterclass of description by Greenwell, who elevates it with such beauty and bewilderment that the reader is awestruck at the sheer power of language.

Herein, perhaps, is what has resulted in such a misinterpretation of the novel, that it is about a privileged dude who can afford the best specialist care thanks to his medical aid, without a thought of the countless pushed to the peripheries of the healthcare system.

He is really only inconvenienced at having to endure a full waiting room of sick and injured people hoping for some care and slight relief. Greenwell is simply not interested in making the same tired old comments about the collapsing healthcare system.

The book is apparently based on his own hospitalisation scare in 2020; the main theme is about how we take our health for granted, until something major happens and we are incapacitated, at the mercy (and fleeting kindnesses) of nurses and doctors, who themselves are inured to the indignities that the medical system inflicts upon its patients in the pursuit of its highest goal, health at any cost.

The narrator only wants to return to his partner, his house, and his job. But the reader knows that something fundamental has shifted in his worldview, and nothing will ever be the same again.

[Henk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction 2025!
Captures brilliantly what seem trivial, both in terms of a hospital experience and in terms of not often documented gay domesticity.
What a strange thing a body is

Garth Greenwell takes something that in essence feels very personal and pedestrian, a hospital stay during the pandemic in relation to a ripped aorta, and manages to transform the experience brilliantly in Small Rain. Nothing much happens but the reflections on being ill and going through the whole hospital process, now well known to me after I had surgery a year ago, are so well done I was left deeply impressed with the humanity and vulnerability the author shows. PET scans, x-rays, MRIs and personal protective measures form part of a daily routine, while doctors try to find out what is happening to the body that is so inexorably is linked to our ongoing existence. Life turns into a whirlpool of activity but also is standing still as if one is outside of normal societal time in a hospital.

The experience gives the main character time to reflect, on his relationship, the family he grew up in, the polarisation the pandemic brings to the country, the stress of a major renovation of a home. There is so much life and reality in this novel, the way sex in a long term relationship is described, while it doesn't shy away from a big question as What gives value to time.
It is all described in a meandering, genuine way that had a real impact on me and led me to round up the novel from 4.5 stars.

[Edward Champion · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dear Wonderful Goodreads Readers: I have suffered through this awful novel so that you don't have to. I urge you in the strongest possible terms not to buy into the hype. This may be the worst novel published in 2024.

Reading SMALL RAIN is like being trapped in an escape room in which all of the fun puzzles and quirky themes have been removed and you’re left staring at soulless cinderblock walls. You slam your fists against the concrete to the point of bleeding, only to hear Garth Greenwell’s faux patrician voice over the PA system. A copy of Small Rain spits out from a secret slit onto the floor. “We’ll let you out when you finish reading.” “I don’t want to read this shit. Let me out now!” “No, you fucking mook. I am Garth Greenwell, certified literary genius. You cannot leave until you get to the last page. You will genuflect to me and provide me with four pints of your blood and your social security number.” “What’s the alternative?” “You will die in this room.”

And because you value your own life, you slog your way through an interminable and truly awful novel set In Iowa City during the summer of 2020 in which an unnamed poet tears an aorta and ends up in the hospital. And stays in that hospital. With occasional visits from his partner L. And he stays in the hospital. And he stays in the hospital. And does nothing but stay in that hospital without really revealing all that much about himself other than that he is a precious prick who talks about his days teaching in Bulgaria (hey, just like Greenwell himself!) when he’s not mixing up foreign accents (the poet speaks fluent Spanish but he can’t recognize a Colombian accent?) or throwing fits before the nurses.

In fact, Greenwell is so superficial that we learn far more about the house that the poet and L. live in than we do about their relationship. There is a meet-cute flashback in an Iowa City joint, but the only thing we learn about this pair is that the two talked about poetry for two hours and that L. in the initial courtship days didn’t speak English very well (despite being a professor?). And they are big on “alternative nights,” which extends to cooking and speaking in different languages. In other words, we have nothing but vapid shorthand and very little reason to care about this couple because Greenwell serves up nothing but boilerplate. In fact, L. is so underwritten that he is almost as stereotypical as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers, at least, had the benison of being hilarious on multiple viewings. It is believed that Garth Greenwell is so humorless that he has not laughed once since the Clinton Administration.

I have more to say. Much more. You can read my full essay here:

https://www.edrants.com/garth-greenwe...

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary. The apex of auto-fiction, naturalism, realism. A human experience in novel form. The closest thing to lived experience I’ve ever read. More sung than written, scored rather than punctuated.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The craft here is breathtaking, the language gorgeous, and I enjoyed the read very much, but being inside the head and in the bed of a person in medical crisis is very claustrophobic and overwhelming. I get that the experience was claustrophobic and overwhelming and so his ability to communicate that feeling, to create a visceral understanding of the experience is brilliant, but I missed the something more. At the end of the book Greenwell gives us the connection to our MCs partner, sister, and mother, and introduces more information about the disconnection between the MC and his father and other siblings. That information IMO should have come to us sooner. That info would help us shift and change alongside the MC as he reflects on what his life was before and how it might and would change going forward. As it was we got that information at the end when it was too late to erase the remove between the reader and the MC. Certainly, a sense of shared experience is created at the beginning as we are all living with the narrator through Covid, Trump part one, and some reckoning on race in America (I think most readers of this book will have had similar experiences of that terrible 2020), but I still believe more information about our MC, not just him in this social and political moment, would have been welcome.

I could not help but compare this to The Two Kinds of Decay which, though nonfiction, does something quite similar. I thought there were individual moments in this book that eclipsed anything in that book (and the prose in Small Rain was better throughout though Manguso's prose is also wonderful), but as a whole I thought Manguso's book was slightly more successful because I could feel the impact on the narrator from the loss of health and certainty and how it changed the importance and meaning of things that had happened before and adjusted her hopes and plans for the future.

All that said, this is a wonderful and very special read and I cannot wait to read the other Greenwell books that have been sitting on my TBR for a very long time.

[Aaron Aceves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written, painfully dull.

[Amina · Rating 3 out of 5]

✰ 3 stars ✰

“Maybe there are only ever provisional truths, about the big questions I mean, the questions about how to live, maybe only competing truths, and maybe that isn’t the same thing as no truths at all, maybe we have to take them as they come.”

If there is one thing reading Small Rain taught me is that before requesting an ARC, it would be advisable to get a scope of the author's writing style, before having to read a latest release of theirs. So that I can assess beforehand whether or not their writing style suits my palette, or at least I can have something to compare with, to determine whether or not it follows the similar pattern of their previous works. 😮‍💨 I have not read a novel by Garth Greenwell before; but the blurb sounded promising and intriguing enough for me to want to give it a try - which I did. And what I surmised is that I probably won't be inclined to read more of their works, but that does not mean I don't appreciate what he was trying to portray in his story.

“That feeling, the feeling of being loved, the surprise of it, had faded over the years, with domesticity and its constant minor frictions, its impediments to freedom; but it was still there, and it flooded me now.”

His latest work follows an unnamed Kentucky-native English teacher, as he relays his time spend in an Iowa hospital amidst the COVID pandemic, where he has been admitted for emergency treatment to the highly life-threatening infrarenal aortic dissection that if they had not caught sooner, could have resulted in immediate death. It is the way that he wrote it - by keeping the protagonist nameless - by referring to the people important to him in his life with only their initials - by only addressing the nurses and doctors assigned to his treatment with their full names - makes this approach a very familiar and hard-hitting one to those who have experienced such a feeling. 👌🏻👌🏻 'You’re trying to make me feel small, the man said, you’re trying to use your intellect to make me feel small, and it’s not going to happen.' The feeling of not knowing what is going to happen to you - by being completely helpless against not only the ignorance of his medical team, by not knowing whether or not he'll heal - that innate fear that clings to one's heart as they try to cope - the embarrassment of being confined to the bed - forced to reveal all one's vulnerabilities and intimate exposures. 😓

It was viscerally described, to the point that all the moments where said protagonist felt his humiliation and shame made me uncomfortable for him, capturing with vivid exposure what it feels when one is a hospital patient. The writing amplified it more so, perhaps by the lack of quotation marks when dialogue is initiated - to the palpable suffering of excruciating pain and daunting fear that a misstep could cost him his life - 'an ER doctor’s dream, you come in thinking you have something simple but it turns out to be much more interesting' - the anger and desire to hurt those who hold his life in his hands and fearing that they aren't taking him seriously. 😢 I admit some of the medical jargon and detailed descriptions of his treatment made me a bit uncomfortable and squeamish, along with the claustrophobic vibe of being confined to the bed, but if it were - then does that not mean the author succeeded in capturing it perfectly?

“Why should I feel aggrieved, I thought, if you want injustice, look there, dying at forty-five or fifty isn’t unjust. So you haven’t seized every moment of your life, who has; people die young every day, I said to myself, younger than you, why act like it’s such a tragedy.”

There was definitely a lack of love for nurses and doctors, worsened by how he had to face so much of it alone at first - no one to express their concerns for him - no one to ask about his well being and how long till he'll come out of his condition with updates about his progress - except for the occasional visit from his Spanish-speaking partner, L that presented even more of a language constraint for speaking up for him. But, towards the end of his ordeal, that irritation and judgmental views shifted to those of appreciation and gratitude - one that shined in how the nurturing care of those he had become so familiar with was one that he would miss out on. 😕 That he did not know if simply saying thank you would be enough; I liked that subtle inclusion. 'It’s like teaching, I guess, a relationship that engendered intensity but had transience built in, so that the sign of its success was its ending.' That despite their shortcomings and the unfortunate circumstances he had to face, we can't deny or ignore how much responsibility rests upon them - especially during a crisis as it is - it is not fair to be so callous in their regard of how they are doing whatever it takes to help him heal as swiftly as possible. 😟

What kept it from being confined simply to his dealings with the incompetency and innate fear - his fierce desperation to heal was how with each current event gave us a reflection on his life - how a significant moment that somehow related to whatever he was going through at that time. It was that simple touch - those certain breaks that interrupted the flow of it being one long story - the gentle reminders of how between dealing with regular checkups and well-meaning caregivers, who irk more than help, provide an insightful look to the memories of his childhood, his studies, his relationships both with his family and L made it a much more personal story. 🥺 Yes, it does make for very long-winded sentences of uninterrupted monologues, which I do agree is showing the stream of consciousness that shows his own conscience as he battles his illness and the capabilities of those his life has been entrusted with. 'Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.' It's that stage of either grieving for missed opportunities or yearning for the chance to live again - the look back on regrets and mistakes and the hope that you can have the chance to make up for them. It's such a natural instinct - the power to live - to survive any disease that comes our way. 🙏🏻 🙏🏻

And that's what stood out for me; this balance the author crafted where it reads like something any person can relate to - an honest and expressive look at what any patient goes through when they are at this pivotal and extremely vulnerable moment where life and death could go either way and it's not only a battle against those who are entrusted to care for him, but also to look back on one's own life, to think about the mistakes made in one's journey and hoping for the promising of reaching a new destination, if all goes well. 😢 'They were terms I could understand, being lost or saved by what one made or failed to make; and I had brought forth so little, I had laid up all my treasures for that future time I wouldn’t have now, maybe, the time that had been cut short.' And yes, at times, I did feel that the prose was meandering off a little too much into self-reflection that did not really amount to anything, but then I would be pulled back in, by the gripping intensity of whatever challenge the protagonist was facing at that time - be it, a faulty assessment or a neglectful inclination that prevented the plot from staying stagnant. 👍🏻

“I know it might be hard to hear but all of that can be a blessing, it can clarify what you care about, how you want to spend your time; and I remembered what L had said on his first visit, that it could remind us how we wanted to live.”

The other part that certainly merits a mention is the relationship between the narrator and L - one built on years of love and support - of trusting in each other through the good times and the bad - all those past arguments and insecurities - the tension that could have led to something more - for when it comes to the time to be there for each other - there is a beautiful heartfelt bond of believing that everything will be alright. 'I was surprised by how much I missed him, more than missed, how much I longed for him.' ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹 Even though it was only a couple of weeks in the hospital, the author gave us plenty of background into their history that made them into well-fleshed out characters that spoke more than just their initials - this deep-rooted love and affection that was sincere and palpable, when they made it through the roughest parts of their lives only to make it safely back into each other's hearts. How this difficult trial helped shape their love into something stronger and deeper that neither of them had any desire to ever break apart from. 🫂 🫂

So, to reiterate my initial thoughts - the writing was not to my tastes, but I do believe that there is a very concrete story buried underneath prose that takes awhile to get the hang off, but one that is deeply impactful and relatable that is both sympathetic and empathetic to those who have lived such an experience. It is summed up quite perfectly by the protagonist, himself - 'one of my favorite poems, authorless, mysterious, the first two lines unparsable: Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne. As he explains its context and meaning behind it, you definitely get a wider appreciation for the rather puzzling and difficult to comprehend at times way in which Garth Greenwell wrote the story - wandering and wavering, yet underneath it all, 'isn’t the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can’t quite make sense of it - so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible.' 🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻

*Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my novel of 2024. A poet and academic (who both is and is not Greenwell) endures a Covid-era medical crisis that takes him to the brink of mortality and the boundary of survivable pain. Over two weeks, we become intimately acquainted with his every test, intervention, setback and fear. Experience is directly transmuted into fluent language (no speech marks and lots of comma splices) that also flies far above a hospital bed, into a vibrant past, a poetic sensibility, a hoped-for normality. I’ve never read so remarkable an account of what it is to be a mind in a fragile body. I’ll be seeking out the rest of Greenwell’s work pronto.

Some of the many amazing lines:

“The whole metaphysical edifice, love and artmaking and thought, poetry and painting, the possibility of God, all of it rested on brute mechanism, on the body taking things in and processing them and voiding what it couldn’t use”

“something else art can do, it can be a laboratory for thinking, for trying out ideas, not just abstractly but feelingly, so that we can live with them and see through them.”

“why we need poems, I think: they exist in a different relationship to attention and to time”

“What a strange thing a body is, I thought, how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail; and how strange to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well. Poor body, I thought again, looking down on it. I had hated it so much and been so ashamed and I might have loved it instead”

[Amy Biggart · Rating 5 out of 5]

second read and i am more convinced garth greenwell’s style of writing is so for me. Said this before and i’ll say it again, this isn’t for everyone. It’s this combination of long stretches in a pandemic hospital room, punctuated by memories of his past and interludes about life, art, and why we’re here.

I do think Garth Greenwell is an excellent narrator of his audiobooks, and I’d recommend anyone who reads it consider that format alongside the book. Paragraph breaks are scarce and the chapters are long — but i sort of think that beautifully reflects the way time moves slowly in the hospital? There’s something very intentional about it to me.

Anyway, poets write great books!!

—

i loveeddd this — not a book for everyone, and if you don't want to spend 200+ pages in a hospital room during the pandemic, do not touch this with a 10-foot pole. But what a beautiful, stressful, scary, sad, heartfelt book about navigating the American healthcare system during the pandemic.

If someone asked me to hand them a book that depicts what life were like during 2020, this would be the one i gave them.

[Troy]

A kaleidoscopic literary page turner about a man’s mystery illness during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I really loved this book because it got really deep in ways I didn’t expect. There was the main plot of the middle aged gay narrator describing his pain and time in the hospital, closer to death than he had ever been before. This really propelled the narrative forward. Garth Greenwell is such a gifted writer. As nurses and doctors try to investigate his history to see what might have caused an aortic rupture in his body, the narrative breaks into small reflections and introspective asides of his history and the moments that have made up his life as he also searches for the cause.

This book was a stark reminder of not taking health for granted. To be human and healthy we have everything. Once that is stripped away, we must face our mortality, which is a truly frightening aspect of being alive. But what made the book beautiful was that it became a meditative exploration of life itself and an ode to the soul inside the shell of our bodies. Highly recommend!

[Mr.Rainbow.Pages]

Review coming soon!

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up at the halfway point. Those lengthy paragraphs did me in. Snooze.

[Jodi]

DNF @ 26%—(Jun 2025) It's lonely way out here on Outlier Island, though I do NOT wish anyone else to join me here. Give it a good try. Sadly, I gave several hours of my time—over 2 sessions—mostly spent waking from quick, unintended naps. I really wanted to love this book; I have several by this author. But it was so DULL and BORING!!! (My apologies to Mr. Greenwell🙏) I just could not continue to put myself through the pain of reading more. I have thousands of ebooks that, I presume, will make me feel more fulfilled that this one has. Therefore, I'm MOVING ON!

[Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an impressive novel. It read like a memoir. I have no idea how close the novel tracks to some personal experience of Mr. Greenwell’s, but it felt very personal. Certainly the first-person narrative helped, but the unusual sentence structure, where the author strings together independent clauses with commas, contributed along with long paragraphs and chapters to make you feel like you were getting the whole story in a rush, in an outburst.

The story begins with the narrator, a poet who is never named, suffering significant physical pain but refusing to go to the emergency room or reach out for any medical assistance for over a week. When he eventually goes to urgent care, he learns he is experiencing a medical emergency. This happens in the fall of 2019 as the world and medical professionals are forced to deal with Covid. The story that follows includes details of health insurance, medical care, medical procedures and the impact of Covid on medical facilities that feels more like non-fiction or a documentary than a novel. It could be a story you or I or one of our family members is telling, but it comes with an intensity that at times make it a thriller. The backstory of the life that the narrator and his lover, L., have been living and the house they have worked together to rebuild also feel true, realistic.

The author has told a story that could be mundane; there is no escapism here. But the story grabbed me and didn’t let me go until the end. There were no surprise twists, just the story of a life reconsidered and not yet complete.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled on this book without really knowing the author. I had heard it was about a medical event which lands the author in the ICU. As a retired medical provider I have a strong interest in how patients see and experience the medical system and the people who care for them in it. (Lately learned this novel is fiction yet it seemed to me to read more like a non-fiction memoir).

Small Rain is exactly that type of book but I found so much more. I did not know Greenwell was gay or that his previous books were largely about the gay experience but that was not a prominent feature in this book. He does talk about his partner and their life together as a backdrop in this medical crisis he is experiencing but what sets this book apart is the writing. From what I gather from this reading, Greenwell is a poet and he brings that into this story both to highlight how he copes and is certainly illustrated in his telling of events.

This is a well told memoir and so beautifully written (I have to say it again) that I interested in reading more of Greenwell, even if the subjects of his other novels do not interest me to the extent this one did. Greenwell reads the book himself and he does a stellar job. I loved his voice and his reading of poetry (I have not had a strong interest in poetry but this did spark my interest, especially of the poets he discussed).

I gave it 4.5 stars, raised it to 5 as I could not put it down and listened to it on a long bus and plane ride. Wish I had the book at hand for some quotes. It is a book I am glad to have read and am so glad I discovered this author.

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first glance, this novel feel starkly different from Greenwell's earlier fiction. "What Belongs to You" and "Cleanness", both set in Bulgaria, explore the gritty spaces of gay kink, anonymous sex and sadomasochism. In contrast, "Small Rain" feels like a middle-aged sequel (all his novels are autofictional to some extent), the story of a gay man in Iowa (once a teacher in Bulgaria) who has developed a life-threatening case of aortitis. When he arrives at the hospital, at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, he is a baffling mystery to his doctors. His nurse tells him repeatedly, "you are very interesting", as if he were an object of curiosity rather than a patient of care. Most cases of aortitis occur in the elderly but he has no medical preconditions and no obvious infection. He is shuttled from the ER to ICU, subjected to a battery of blood tests, ultra sounds and cat scans, and his skin becomes a checkerboard of bruises from all the IV drips, injections and catheters inserted into his arms, legs and stomach—this is worlds away from Eastern European fetish dungeons of his earlier novels. But nonetheless, Greenwell distinguishes himself as a poetic authority on intimacy and voyeurism except, in this novel, these themes are foregrounded in the hospital ward rather than the bedroom. Specialists visit, followed by a train of medical students, and constantly examine and question him at all hours. The narrator is watched, prodded, massaged, and needled, and he has to become used to strangers helping him walk, move and urinate. The hospital is a paradoxical site: cold and impersonal but still intimate and tactile. In that respect, the hospital actually isn't so different from the cruising spot—a place where a man is more of a body and less of a person. The sexual passivity of the gay man in "Cleanness" becomes the clinical passivity of the patient in "Small Rain". In one particularly poignant moment, he describes how the "particularizing attention of the doctors, the precise data they collected about my body had nothing to do with me". It's eerily like a one-night hook-up, the man reduced to an assemblage of flesh to be gazed at and quickly handled.

I thought this was a beautiful novel that turned the excruciating uncertainty and long waiting-times of hospital care into a poetic meditation on the body and suffering. In the hospital, language seems to break down. He is asked to rate his pain on a scale but he's not sure if his "8" corresponds to what his doctors understand by "8" (and as Wittgenstein would say, pain is a fundamentally private sensation that cannot be communicated, that cannot transcend our intersubjective boundaries—no one can directly share their own internal experiences; no one can objectively feel someone else's pain). Greenwell's novel is in some ways an attempt to make sense of this pain and his fragile physical and mental health. The narrator's own body is an enigma to him—a machine, a piece of circuitry, a complex object he had never thought about until it became dysfunctional. The doctors use a vocabulary that sometimes stuns and sometimes distresses him. His doctor mentions the possibility of a "false lumen" and he immediately thinks how beautiful it sounds; a nurse describes poppers as "vasodilators" and he just thinks, "what a beautiful word". The technical jargon and Latinate flourishes (the "lumen" and "vena cava") of the specialists are, in his literary mind, a source of verbal wonder rather than a clear-cut explanation. But the metaphors the doctors use are equally disturbing to him: one says that they will be "carpet-bombing" his veins and he is alarmed. He's not sure what is happening to his own body or what the treatments are doing exactly—the doctor-speak is shrouded in the hermetic verbiage of the medical textbook or garbled by some vulgar hyperbole. The hospital exposes everything he doesn't know about himself—his internal anatomy, his mental fragility, the limits of his language.

This makes it all sound highfalutin and philosophical and I'm not giving the novel full justice. It's a highly readable story that dramatizes the bewildering failures and obstacles of healthcare in America, the insurance companies refusing to pay for a procedure, the inexperienced nurse obstinately unwilling to listen to his pleas, the dispassionate doctors dismissing his questions; it's a reminder of the COVID era—the paralyzing uncertainty, the mounting death tolls, the culture war over masking, the state-by-state policies, the contradictory health advice, a collective trauma which already seems to be selectively disappearing into partisan amnesia. It's also a love story, a man isolated in a room, waiting for his boyfriend to be allowed to visit him. A beautiful story.

[Tiernan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knocked the wind out of me

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5

Garth Greenwell had his share of misfortune in 2020. 'Small Rain' is an autobiographical account of a period he spent on the intensive care of a hospital in Iowa City, with a life-threatening condition. It wasn't COVID, but it was 2020 and the pandemic was still at its height.

Greenwell speaks about the care he received, the pain, fear and uncertainty he felt, but there are thoughtful digressions too, on American healthcare, on a divided society, on poetry and teaching poetry in an age of social media, on human contact, on buying a house and living together. It is a Covid-novel too in a sense and it was good te be reminded of the care workers.

Auto-fiction is a genre I usually enjoy, and I appreciate Greenwell's clear prose and his openness (as in previous works) very much.

I recommend the audiobook read by the author who has a very sympathetic voice.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had issues with Greenwell in the past, but this was excellent. Soft and slow, thoughtful; I love how the prose takes its time and lingers in each moment rather than moving towards a point. Some beautiful thinking on illness and wellness; pondering on meaning and what bestows it. At first I thought the writing was a bit over-pious (Greenwell writes very melodically, with a tendency to overreach in his lyricism), but as I relaxed into it I ended up really believing the first-person voice. Also, short and an easy one to get through.

[Yahaira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this and was engrossed in the story from the start. Such beautiful, heartfelt writing that makes you pause and ponder the mysteries of life. If you have ever been hospitalized with a serious illness or have had to advocate for a loved one in hospital, this will resonate with you.

Highly recommend.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe one of the defining post-COVID novels. A sociological consideration of the medical establishment, Middle America, frailty, death, love, and many other big themes that appear idiotic when listed sequentially. Sections of this make you feel the wonder of poetry, not because the writing itself is a wonder, but because Greenwell wonderfully succeeds in expressing the sensuous and intellectual and historical and present beauties that poetry (and literature (and art) at large) engenders. Very moving in its open-hearted compassion and grace.

[Jeff Tarantino · Rating 2 out of 5]

I unfortunately do not think I am a Garth Greenwell fan. While his writing can be beautiful and I enjoyed the simplicity of learning more about his life through his conversations with hospital staff, I found moments such as 12 pages dedicated to why he likes a poem, to be tedious and hard for me to care enough to read through.

[Domenic · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst novels I’ve ever read. A remarkable accomplishment to produce something so utterly devoid of humor or levity and full of empty sanctimony.

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read all of Garth Greenwell's novels, and this one has to be the most accomplished yet. By a strange coincidence, since the narrator of Greenwell's novel suffers from an arterial rupture of unknown cause, the novel is best read alongside Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, an ethnography of atherosclerosis. In Greenwell's case, the body multiple is also enacted through a series of references to art, poetry, music-the poet's body is constituted by his memories and experiences as well as by medical, nursing, and pharmacological practices. And also by care (Mol's The logic of care can again be a companion text). The novel offers a detailed phenomenology not only of the (multiple) body in pain (another companion: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World), but also of the infrastructures of care, whom they support and and how. On a very personal level, while I'm terrible at reading poetry, those few pages on Oppen almost convinced me to give it another chance.