Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’.
But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like ‘someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked’. After suffering an aortic tear, the narrator finds himself in a disorienting world of beeping machines and doctors visiting at all hours. We then track his spell as a patient in ICU.
Set in 2020 during the pandemic, the novel is necessarily restricted. The action is confined to a hospital bed, with IV lines and drips preventing its narrator from moving freely. There are few characters: a friendly doctor, and another unable to conceal her excitement at being involved in such an ‘interesting’ case; a kind, caring nurse, and her slapdash counterpart. The narrator has a partner, identified only as L, who visits him in the afternoons. Their intimacy is somewhat inhibited by the masks they wear.
This is a novel of detail, describing scans and the difficulty of performing simple bodily tasks. But it expands far beyond its notional restrictions.
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