Garth Greenwell is unafraid to depict plainly what often goes unspoken ... But Small Rain is not a critique of U.S. health care disguised as a novel. Its power, instead, comes from the dissonance between the terrifying condition of waiting for answers and the flights of imagination that this purgatory, paradoxically, sustains ... Throughout Small Rain, a consistency of cadence makes the novel feel like a cohesive whole—not unlike the recurring motif you might hear in a movement of a symphony. Inspiring acts of kindness and moments of mundane bureaucracy are depicted with the same tender attention.
Each blood draw, each medical detail, is presented with documentary precision, lifted, one assumes, from life ... The narrator becomes conversant in a new language—the language of the medical system—and a new vocabulary of touch ... There is something almost showy about the formal challenge of this novel ... From a tale of great pain—a rare kind of story—it becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love, ordinary happiness ... Small Rain feels like a culmination, which comes with its own feeling of melancholy for the reader.
...a paean to some of life’s most meaningful pleasures ... It’s a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical. As in all great novels, its philosophical insights are spliced with details that root the work in a specific time and place but do nothing to diminish its timelessness.
The good news about Small Rain is that medical sagas, like heist movies, have layers of built-in drama ... The bad news is that, in its slow piling on of medical minutiae over more than 300 pages, Small Rain listlessly drifts ... There is little humor, and this lack gives the book a passive quality. (Gallows humor is frequently the best part of illness stories) ... It gives me no pleasure to find so little pulse in “Small Rain.” I’m a Greenwell fan. Can a misfire be a blessing in disguise?
Meticulously observed ... The writing dwells on...down-to-earth matters, which Mr. Greenwell evokes with crystalline immediacy ... The writing regularly digresses into personal memories and meditations on art, always circling the theme of life’s inherent fragility.
Our narrator’s engaged readings yield songs in praise of America’s communal spirit ... Greenwell pushes his narrator’s prodigious analytic gifts and humanist sympathies to their limits in a rhapsodic—and sometimes ridiculous—passage about that most humble of American products, the potato chip ... The sentences retain the alluring patter of Greenwell’s earlier books, but the narrator’s preoccupation with the framing of his material feels new, or at least raised to a new intensity ... At times, there seems to be nowhere that Greenwell’s storytelling can’t reach. It is more than capable of holding a reader suspended in longing, horror, or affection, all without explaining its own inner workings ... The best of Greenwell’s writing brings to mind an overflowing container.
A masterpiece of a novel, a single breath of life that contains the world in all its beautiful and horrifying minutiae. Greenwell narrates the personal in an absorbing style where fear is supplanted by discovery, cynicism by a desire to be loved.
Musical ... Greenwell flouts the sumptuary laws of style, favoring run-on, comma-spliced sentences sequined with archaic words and unfashionably long paragraphs that can billow out to several pages without a line break or indentation ... Lush with literary references, the novel invites still more.
To the degree that Small Rain is another instalment in an unmaking and remaking of Garth Greenwell’s writerly self, it offers a welcome call to action – to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew.
Sparse prose interspersed with occasional lyrical musings ... The body is the medium of Greenwell’s humanism. Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, he explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain – not through ascribing morality to sickness, but through our response to it ... Suffering’s monotony isn’t noble, Greenwell suggests, but something that teaches us how to live nonetheless.
Greenwell thinks like a poet; his novels think like poems think. He lingers in contradiction, oscillates between negation and assertion, asks questions, fails to make up his mind ... One man’s reflections on a life lived and not lived, with his partner and in solitude, on poetry and music. All the rest, it turns out, is backdrop; it’s there so we can see what’s before us more clearly ...Tthere is more faith, in this prose, in the redemptive power of art-as-attention; and less concern that, in seeking refuge from the world, one misses anything.
Greenwell’s engrossing third novel expands its own tight parameters to touch on human solitude and interdependence, art and its purpose, and life itself, in all its ordinary and extraordinary precarity.
Moving yet unsentimental ... A novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.
Greenwell captures an entry into that world perfectly, in this novel that is hazy, slow, thoughtful, and yet suspenseful, dreadful, and anxious, cementing his place in the literature of chronic illness while putting another poetic, rich work of fiction on our bookshelves.
