“Cleanness” Reviewed

“It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though really that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to that world R. had lifted me out of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.”

— from Cleanness

Cleanness 

By Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

W

hen “Harbor” appeared in the Sept. 16, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, it seemed to be a small story, finely crafted, as all of Greenwell’s stories are, but it did not linger on my mind. It did not haunt me. It wasn’t until Cleanness was published in January 2020 and I re-encountered the story that “Harbor” fell into place as a necessary piece of Greenwell’s expansive narrative.

Cleanness is a book about desire — actually, let’s give that a capital “D” — it is a book about Desire. It is about yearning and the mix of good and bad that this entails. It is also a book about moments; a life told in an exploration of events, of nights, of encounters, of looks — some small, some huge, but each in its own way profound. “Harbor,” for example, describes a night where colleagues (on the verge of becoming friends) drink together and go to the seaside only to watch one of their group, a priest, strip down and dive into the water. Alone, it’s a story about nothing. There is no grand moral to it, no swelling crescendo, yet as the priest swims to shore at the very end, fighting waters that try to drag him back out to sea, the reader is left with a sense of an unexplored vastness, something at the periphery of the story that is pulling at the narrator towards something larger. What feels un — or perhaps under — explored in this story alone, adds to the overall atmosphere of Cleanness as a whole. 

The publisher describes Cleanness as being about an American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, navigating a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. This both captures the essential story and fails to describe what this book is truly about. No love story is ever just a love story, and this love story is, at its core, about desire and about shame far more than it is about love.

Garth Greenwell (What Belongs to You, Picador, 2016), is an American writer and poet, and with Cleanness he evokes a sensibility reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst — not just in the queerness within (or as) mundanity that is a shared theme in both Greenwell and Hollinghurst, but also in their use of language, which, while being quite technically different, is similar in that both are masterful, artful, and never undeliberate. That Greenwell is also a poet, cannot be far from the readers’ attention throughout all of Cleanness. 

Through the story, there are moments that are quite striking, but the true grace of this book is in how Greenwell moves from the safe and even commonplace, to such supreme and brutal violences in an instant, giving his scenes an element of the sublime. Yet throughout, neither Cleanness nor Greenwell cast judgement; they examine pleasure and pain, love and shame, lust and desire — all these sweet contradictions — in a way that refuse aspersions of morality or appeals to hedonism. The result is a kind of anti-moral writing, nuanced, profound.