WITH A GRACEFUL FLICK OF THE WRIST, Garth Greenwell produces a small pink fan, unfolds it, and flutters it in front of his face, an elegant move executed with such deft sleight of hand I don’t notice whether he pulled the fan from his bag or back pocket. I’m impressed and envious—sweat stipples my forehead as well. We’re at a café in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Outside, the overcast day cannot decide whether it wants to be muggy or chilly. Either way it’s uncomfortable, and as we order iced coffee we reminisce about the last time we met in person, in November 2019, in the same neighborhood, when the weather was inhospitable in another extreme, windy and frigid. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everyone’s lives, but for me and Greenwell something else changed, too.
In July 2020, in Brooklyn, I was hospitalized for a sharp pain in my gut that several hours of scrutiny and tests determined to be caused by an intestinal blockage. Surgery cleared it, though no one could figure out why a forty-something like me, healthy and without a history of digestive issues, would experience a life-threatening problem like this, more common in much older people. Around the same period, in Iowa City, where he lives with his partner, Greenwell was also hospitalized. In his case, the issue was with his heart. His latest book of fiction, his third, the novel Small Rain, out in September from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, begins with just this situation: An unnamed narrator enters the hospital during the height of the pandemic for a torn aorta, a painful and potentially fatal condition not often experienced in middle age. To treat the problem requires knowing what caused it, and that mystery catalyzes the narrative.
In a bright corner by the front window of the café, the fan now folded on the table next to his coffee, Greenwell explains how the novel grew out of his own medical emergency. “In some sense, writing was my trying to deal with mortality. At the heart of this book is the question, ‘Okay, if this is it, then what has my life meant? How