Will Sheets: You just published your third novel, Small Rain, which was one of the standout books from last year, receiving praise from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NBC, BBC, and the list goes on. The majority of the novel takes place in a hospital room as the narrator undergoes a medical crisis. This book, in conjunction with your prior novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, has garnered you a reputation as one of the world’s premier writers of sex. How has your focus and treatment of the human body changed in this new novel, one concerned with health and wellness, when compared to your previous work?

 

Garth Greenwell: In one sense, I think what interests me has always been the body in crisis. Small Rain begins with a very clear crisis, the narrator’s experience of disfiguring pain. But sex is a crisis, too: an experience when the usual processes of the body are interrupted or unsettled. But sex is social, and for much of Small Rain the narrator is locked in solitude—and also confined to a bed. The challenge of this new novel was to find a structure that could make that confinement dramatic, at least to my satisfaction; how to make a character who spends almost the entire book in bed somehow the protagonist of an adventure. The solution—again, I mean for my own satisfaction, not necessarily anyone else’s—was to make his consciousness as restless as his body is stationary. In that way, I think this novel is more wandering, more wide-ranging, than the earlier, more obviously peripatetic books.

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WS: You’ve spoken before, especially after the release of your second novel, Cleanness, about the tendency of both yourself and others to find happiness a less interesting subject than trauma, an attitude you find to be flawed. When reading Small Rain, I felt a profound joy emanating from your writing, a joy born of family, a sense of safety, deep romantic love, and a love of art and poetry, amidst all the anxiety and fear of a medical scare. Could you speak on how you were able to present and explore this joy in the middle of a story full of worrisome and stressful events?

 

GG: I’m so happy the novel left you with a sense of joy. At some point, over the weeks of talking about the book, I realized that the best way to describe its structure is as a series of nested experiences of brokenness. It’s a book about a broken body, in a broken house, in a broken country, on a broken planet. And also that a recognition of that brokenness makes each of those things, in an unexpected way, available to care. The experience of brokenness, or the recognition of brokenness, becomes an occasion for investment, for attachment. This is another way of saying that the experience of almost losing his life makes the narrator realize that he cherishes his life. The pain that strikes him down at the beginning of the book sweeps the world away from him; and, in sweeping it away—and so awakening the narrator to it, making him realize its preciousness—the pain delivers the world back to him.

 

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WS: Your first novel, What Belongs To You, began your journey as an author, but before then, you wrote poetry. It’s clear from your work that you still retain a deep love for poetry. How would you say your experience and familiarity with poetry affects the stylistic aspects of your prose?

 

GG: My education as a poet, and my even earlier education as a musician—everything I do as a prose writer comes from them. My feeling of what a sentence can be, my feeling of how a scene should move, my sense of dramatic scaffolding, of what drama is: all of that comes from lyric poetry and from opera. That makes my novels move in unconventional ways, which alienates some readers. But North American realist prose practice just hasn’t been central to my formation as a literary person; the points of my aesthetic compass orient me in other directions.

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WS: Small Rain is your first book set outside of Bulgaria, the backdrop for Cleanness and What Belongs to You, instating taking place in the American Midwest. Was it difficult to move away from Bulgaria as a setting, or did you relish the opportunity to explore America through this new novel?

 

GG: When I finished Cleanness, I felt my imagination finally, after six or seven years of writing about it, detach from Sofia. But it took me a long time to feel it root someplace else. For a long time I felt that the Midwest, Iowa City, wasn’t a subject for literature. For me, I mean—obviously Iowa looms large in literature; but I didn’t feel that chemical reaction that is the imagination beginning to process the material around me. I’m not sure how to explain why that finally began to happen. A core belief of mine is that literature is everywhere; that literary insight is a matter of looking not a question of subject matter. Slowly, over the years—and probably becoming a homeowner has a lot to do with this—I came to see the dramatic potential in everydayness.​​

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WS: Writing a novel, like any artistic pursuit, is an act of bravery, especially when that artistic work is presented to a large audience. This is doubly applicable to your work, as all your novels feel very private, detailing private feelings and actions, our private shame and desire. Do you ever think about the dichotomy of writing very emotionally and physically intimate novels which are then presented to a large audience? If so, what do you make of it?

 

GG: I think one benefit of having been a poet for twenty years before writing my first novel is that I don’t feel any temptation to imagine an audience while I’m working. Writing is my intensest experience of privacy: I write for myself, to satisfy myself; and I write to be in conversation with writers of the past I love. Publication, events, responses from readers: I try to keep all of that separate from the real work of writing. It is always vertiginous to have a private thing become public, and I don’t always feel that I navigate that process well. The values of publishing, of book tour, aren’t the values of art making, and it’s painful to feel, in the weeks you spend promoting a book, that your values, your real values, are being distorted. The challenge once all of that is over is to find one’s way back to privacy, to reality: to one’s studio, one’s desk, one’s notebook. ​​

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