BOOK REVIEW OF GARTH GREENWELL’S CLEANNESS

For much of my childhood and through my twenties, I didn’t identify as being a reader at all. There wasn’t a single time as a kid when I pulled up the sheets late at night, turned on a flashlight to sneak in extra reading time. (Flashlights were for holding under your chin to look demonic and for making Little Bunny Foo Foo shadow images against the wall.) I read what was required: all the Bronte and Shakespeare works deemed good for you in high school, tons of history texts throughout university and hefty casebooks during law school. I subscribed to newspapers and forgot my first boyfriends were in the same room as I devoured each issue of Entertainment Weekly. I logged a lot of reading time but, because I wasn’t slogging through books by Margaret Atwood, Edmund White and James Joyce, I’d defensively scrunch up my nose when people asked what I was reading. “Nothing!” I’d say. I thought my kind of reading didn’t count.

I’ve always felt that there’s something snobbish and exclusionary about the way some avid readers portray themselves, oohing over all the long listed Booker Prize titles they’ve read and proclaiming that reading Dostoevsky—in Russian, of course—was radically transformative. How could I mention that I liked a book by John Grisham or that I read a breezy “summer read” by Armistead Maupin in frosty January?

All this is a long set-up to saying that sometimes I don’t like the books I’m supposed to like. Translation: My response to literary fiction is often meh or worse. I think it’s a failing of a writer to artificially create barriers to the accessibility of his or her work. (Leave that to poetry.)

A number of years ago, while strolling the aisles of a bookstore, I discovered Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader and I felt like I was having a religious experience just from reading the back cover. His “10 inalienable rights” included “the right not to read”, “the right to skip”, “the right to read anything” and “the right not to finish a book.” Amen. Hallelujah! The book is a delightful read. My copy is chock full of Post-it notes, marking spots where I wanted to stand and applaud.

What do I say then about Garth Greenwell’s short story collection, Cleanness? Greenwell is one of the It gay authors of the moment who received raves for his previous work, What Belongs to You, and who first came to my attention earlier this year when The New York Times Book Review waxed rhapsodic about this follow-up. Indeed, the reviewer offered not a single criticism, instead lauding the work as “bravura writing” and “brilliantly executed”. I added the title to my ever-expanding reading list because of the praise given to how Greenwell writes sex scenes: “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 writing about sex...achieves an unusual depth of accuracy both about physical activity and emotional undercurrent.” I felt it might help me to be more honest and fearless in my own writing.

To be sure, Greenwell is a talented writer and the setting is interesting. Each story is set in Sofia, Bulgaria with a common narrator, a gay American teacher, guarded about his sexuality given that homosexuality is not well accepted there. (According to Wikipedia, same-sex activity is legal, anti-discrimination laws have been in place since 2004 and a same-sex marriage conducted in France was recognized by a Bulgarian court last year. Still, it’s not apparently a country where most LGBTQ people feel comfortable being open.) Bulgaria then is the kind of place where a gay writer can continue to write about taboos, repression and shame without his work being dismissed as passé as some editors and publishers seem to do in North America. Greenwell explores these themes, adding tension to his narratives.

Perhaps it’s a fault of mine as a reader, but I was put off by some of Greenwell’s choices regarding form and style. For starters, the each character is identified by a single initial instead of having a name. It’s okay in stories that involve just the narrator and one other character, but it needlessly adds confusion in scenes with multiple characters as in “Decent People” where the narrator interacts with many people at a protest. Who is M.? Has he already mentioned D.? What about K.? Is S. male or female even?

Then there’s the author’s choice to forgo quotations and separate paragraphs for different speakers in passages of dialogue. Question marks only make occasional appearances and it seemed to be random as to when one was used and when one wasn’t. (Maybe there was a pattern but who wants to spend their time reading trying to figure out an individual writer’s very own rules for question marks?)

Why?

I recall the first time I learned about poet ee cummings and the fact that he eschewed the use of capital letters. As a twelve-year-old, I thought that was super cool. Now? Not so much. It’s telling that I can’t recall anything about the poet’s work other than his fondness for lowercase letters.

These choices create unnecessary distractions and blips in comprehension—nothing major but one of a writer’s objectives should be to create a flow in his writing. Punctuation, for instance, exists to make a passage easier to read. Sorry, but abandoning conventions doesn’t make you unconventional (or avant-garde or literary); it’s just irksome. My opinion only. None of this is mentioned in any of the reviews I perused. Still, it’s not a good thing to needlessly irk a reader. It only adds to the crankiness in navigating Greenwell’s fondness for overly long paragraphs which can stretch on for two or three pages. Again, I think some would say that’s something you find in literary fiction. La-di-da.

I was relieved that Greenwell didn’t further stoke my annoyance with flowery prose and esoteric vocabulary. (Okay, there were a couple of adjectives that I could have done without. I almost threw the book against my living room wall when he used seven descriptors for a sound in a single sentence, including the word chthonic. Don’t bother looking it up.)

Maybe I should stick with Calvin & Hobbes comics. (Pure joy. Always.)

I don’t read a lot of short stories but, from so many reviews I’ve read of various collections, they can be hit or miss. That shouldn’t be surprising. Without the ongoing plot and characters that come within the structure of a novel, each short story has to live on its own merits in a shorter space. Of the nine stories in Cleanness, a third of them—“Mentor” (about a student talking about his struggles being gay), “Decent People” (about a protest that seems to build in tension but fizzles out) and “Harbor” about a group of not very interesting acquaintances drinking and hanging out by the sea—failed to resonate with me. Two more, “Gospodar” and “The Little Saint,” are about sadomasochism, with the narrator switching roles from submissive in the former to dominant in the latter. I suppose SM lends itself to shame and repression and may contrast well with any accompanying intimacy. The fact that it’s SM in both felt repetitive.

By far, the best part of the book is the middle section, three linked stories involving a relationship between the older narrator and R., a student in Bulgaria from the Azores. Part of the strength of this section is that there is more time to develop a single relationship, one mixed with desire, love and permission to (momentarily) break free from the perceived restrictions of Bulgaria as the two embark on a trip to Italy. Really, if Greenwell had taken this section and expanded it into a full novel, I’d have been far more satisfied. Maybe I’d have even let go of my quibbles about pretentious writing choices.

Maybe. It’s a simple word, nothing arty about it at all, and yet it carries so many possibilities.