Incandescent ... [Greenwell's] writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage ...Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review What Belongs to You ] ... The range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound ... Incomparably bittersweet ... Brilliant.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post —Alex Ross, The New Yorker (Best Books of 2020) — Jim Zarroli, NPR Books (Best Books of 2020) —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire (Best Books of 2020 So Far) —Annabel Gutterman, TIME (Best Books of 2020 So Far) —Martha Ann Toll, NPR Books “ [Cleanness ] is, quite simply, a work of genius that will change the way you understand the world and your place in it.” — Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly —Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review — Julian Lucas, Harper’s —Michael Upchurch, The Boston Globe — Omar El Akkad, The Millions — Michael Lapointe, The TLS (UK) Cleanness ] thrums with life; it invites readers to a state of higher intensity, such that as you move through it you begin to feel an awareness of and an awe at the possibility that life could actually be lived that way.” — Nellie Hermann, Los Angeles Times —Dennis Lim, BookForum —Sigrid Nunez, The New York Review of Books —Jake Nevins, The New York Times —Francesca Carington, The Sunday Telegraph (UK), Novel of the Week "Greenwell is a great stylist, with the tone and structure of his sentences shifting each time his central character changes position in the narrative ... In a single sentence he manages to juxtapose ideas in such a way as to create a shiver of recognition in the reader." —Alan Murrin, The Spectator (UK) —Steven Tagle, them. —Booklist (Starred) Cleanness ] pushes more sexual boundaries this time, and Greenwell admirably pushes them too by depicting those desires with an unflinching frankness. Sadomasochism, unprotected sex, the narrator’s voyeuristic attraction to one of his students: They are all elements of the story, portrayed in Greenwell’s precise, elegant style . . . Brave and beautiful.”—Kirkus Review (Starred) piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative .”—Publishers Weekly What Belongs to You . Here, in this frequently breathtaking novel-in-stories, he follows a nameless American narrator walking among the shadows of Bulgaria’s underground gay scene in search of ‘the key to the latch of the self.’”—Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah magazine online (Most Anticipated) What Belongs to You , think of this as a sequel that doesn’t let chronology worry it...Look forward to more of the exquisite, high-wire sex writing that has earned Greenwell his reputation."—Hillary Kelly, Vulture (Most Anticipated) Cleanness ] is explicitly—almost incandescently—erotic. In scenes containing both tenderness and violence, Greenwell showcases his powers as a taxonomist of touch.” —Cornelia Channing, Paris Review (Staff Pick) Cleanness , is an audacious wonder, whose nine stories of intensely textured personal interactions form an unusually hard to define novelistic whole. The book is an argument against convention, both structurally and on the character level—the melding of forms makes Cleanness feel both unique and familiar as it explores the boundaries of longing and the turbulence of love.” —Adam Dalva, Guernica “Cleanness is a sublime book— Ian J. Battaglia, The Chicago Review of Books —Emily Temple, LitHub Cleanness ] hones in on queer desire, shame, and trauma. Greenwell’s prose is lyrically brutal and filled with anger, regret, disappointment, and, mostly importantly, eros. Greenwell is a master at writing about longing, but is also expert at navigating emotionally fraught sex scenes that can quickly descend into scenes of detachment, alienation, and violence; Cleanness is devastating."—Josh Vigil, Full Stop Searingly immediate and authentic ... The theme beneath the flesh is powerful and subtle: a quest for the kind of intimacy which, rather than confirming a lover's identity, upends it." — The Economist Cleanness exposes readers to love & sex in all of its messy iterations, & it does so with a deftness of language that makes Greenwell one of the most accomplished writers of our era.”—Jarrett Neal, The Chicago Review of Books magnificently controlled book, Greenwell places himself in a queer canon that is at some remove from the queer men coming of age more recently … It is deeply radical to reclaim the “filthy” spaces of queer longing , to find, again, the guilt or the complicity in the violence enacted by one queer man on another, all things that feel more and more excised from queer writing … Somehow, Cleanness avoids all that.” Like the work of Jean Genet before him, Greenwell transforms individual appetites into expressions of unlikely commonality . His fictions depict moments of epiphanic desperation—shame, pleasure, remorse, and ecstasy—in which the mysteries of spirit and flesh are rendered briefly legible … There are also moments of almost unbearable gentleness in Cleanness , sentences that feel like pressing on soft tissue.” The Baffler I was grateful for this book, as if it had been written for me alone … Greenwell writes about moments of nuance with unrelenting precision, seeking not to flatten them but to fan them out into an array displaying their every possible shade. His structure reflects that gentle exploration: the sentences revise and layer over themselves, and the sections of the book, each of which could stand alone as its own story, seem to inhale and exhale into one another, as if in waves, drawing the water and sending it out again against the shore.” Paris Review (Staff Pick) an extraordinary, disturbing, visceral novel that seduces as much as it scalds.” Providence Journal Gorgeous, achingly earnest and sincere … Cleanness is a novel about desire. A novel about love. About being human.” The Literary Review Cleanness … His prose inhabits and describes spaces of unbounded connection, on the streets and in the sheets .” LitHub The Provincetown Independent I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. These stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.” Her Body and Other Parties remarkable power, vulnerability and an operatic beauty. Such is the compelling journey of the characters of this book that we come to a new understanding of the body, loneliness, risk, desire and even anguish, but also a tenderness, a hard-won grace that can and does transform. What he leaves us with is an absolute truth —love is what drives us all towards light, towards any kind of redemption, but we must earn it, we must give all to it.”The Secret History of Las Vegas unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional, delight of a novel —Garth Greenwell writes like no one else.”A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.”Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 In Cleanness , I found an end to a loneliness I didn't know—until now—how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off—sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar—and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master. ”How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex—locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradation, sweetness, confusion, and rage. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison. His perfect noticing extends to the way we experience love and loneliness, the feeling of exile, and the eternal search for home .”Motherhood Cleanness is an impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist— to fight. ” The End of Eddy
In much the way that other male American writers, such as Hemingway, Baldwin and Edmund White, have chosen Paris as the place in which their lone protagonist can be tested and changed, Greenwell uses Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, as his caldron…Greenwell's version of Sofia sometimes allows him to isolate his characters in a densely made monochrome. He can remove them from any natural hinterland, cover them in mystery and then allow them to emerge into a scrupulously modulated clarity.
The New York Times Book Review - Colm Toibin
…[an] incandescent second novel…Greenwell extends his reach in Cleanness. It's a better, richer, more confident novel. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. It's a novel in search of ravishment…Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning…[His] sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
10/21/2019
A young American teacher’s reckonings with intimacy and alienation compose the through line of Greenwell’s elegant and melancholy volume (after What Belongs to You ). Nine stories track the unnamed narrator, who teaches literature in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. Documenting the narrator’s relationship with R., a Portuguese university student, and its dissolution, the stories are touchstones in his emotional development, from an attempt to shepherd a student through the crisis of first love in “Mentor,” to an encounter with homophobia in the midst of an outpouring of national solidarity in “Decent People.” As the teacher’s hopes of a life with R. fade, he returns to sex with men he meets online, which proves both dangerous, as in the chilling “Gospodar,” and revelatory, as in his encounter with the self-abnegation of the young man he calls Svetcheto, “Little Saint.” Unresolved regarding his own character, “how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek,” the narrator struggles to guide the young people he teaches, conscious of the chasm of experience and expectation between them. Greenwell writes about sex as a mercurial series of emotional states and is lyrical and precise in his descriptions of desires and motivations he suggests are not subject to control or understanding. This is a piercingly observant and meticulously reflective narrative. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Jan.)
Garth Greenwell’s superb narration makes a powerful case for authors reading their own work. This bleak, honest novel is about the impossibility of knowing all the complicated truths of a person. In a series of vignettes, a gay American teacher in Bulgaria describes various encounters—ailenating, romantic, disturbing, and tender—with friends, students, lovers, and hookups. There’s an open tenderness in Greenwell’s voice that’s immediately compelling. His narration is emotional but unencumbered, inviting listeners to simply exist with the character in the moment. This is especially apparent in his depictions of several sexual encounters that oscillate between intimate and violent. Though the novel includes dialogue, Greenwell doesn’t alter his voice as he shifts between characters, a choice that adds to the intensity and power of the first-person point of view. L.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Garth Greenwell’s superb narration makes a powerful case for authors reading their own work. This bleak, honest novel is about the impossibility of knowing all the complicated truths of a person. In a series of vignettes, a gay American teacher in Bulgaria describes various encounters—ailenating, romantic, disturbing, and tender—with friends, students, lovers, and hookups. There’s an open tenderness in Greenwell’s voice that’s immediately compelling. His narration is emotional but unencumbered, inviting listeners to simply exist with the character in the moment. This is especially apparent in his depictions of several sexual encounters that oscillate between intimate and violent. Though the novel includes dialogue, Greenwell doesn’t alter his voice as he shifts between characters, a choice that adds to the intensity and power of the first-person point of view. L.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
★ 2019-09-30What Belongs to You (2016).
At the heart of that last novel was Mitko, a gay hustler who fueled the narrator's pained desire, then disgust, and ultimately empathy, but he doesn't appear here. The narrator pushes more sexual boundaries this time, and Greenwell admirably pushes them too by depicting those desires with an unflinching frankness. Sadomasochism, unprotected sex, the narrator's voyeuristic attraction to one of his students: They are all elements of the story, portrayed in Greenwell's precise, elegant style. The narrator's experience seems to align with Greenwell's; the writer has acknowledged the autofictional nature of his writing. Depictions of rough sex bookend the novel, but it's the narrator's relationship with Portuguese student R., who appeared briefly in What Belongs to You , that occupies most of Greenwell's attention. Both marooned in Sofia, the men are happy together until they acknowledge the futilities both of staying in Bulgaria and in a long-distance relationship. One of Greenwell's talents is making everyday occurrences feel dramatic and full of ambivalence and nuance, but the scenes featuring the relationship at the heart of the novel suffer a bit in comparison to the dramatic sex depicted in other sections. Still, the simple beauty of the writing is something to behold. Here he is evoking a wind from Africa that assaults Sofia: "There was something almost malevolent about it, as if it were an intelligence, or at least an intention, carrying off whatever wasn't secure, worrying every loose edge."
Brave and beautiful.
