Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Small Rain

This novel doesn't feel like any other novel, a very high compliment. It is strange to read a book that documents something so clearly and perfectly and realize that you cannot remember finding it in any other book or film. The something it documents is, broadly, how it feels to be in a hospital in America in the 21st century. But, of course, within that are so many other things. The fragility and strangeness of the body, the loss of autonomy and all the fear and anxiety that go with it, the ways your mind and your body can seem two entirely unconnected things, and the strangely specific world of a hospital in the summer of 2021.

A hospital is a place without privacy, without intimacy, and often there can be a near complete loss of the sense of self between physical suffering, medication, etc. Greenwell's novel, like his previous ones, follows an unnamed writer who is quite similar to Greenwell himself, though this time we are firmly in America, the writer lives in Iowa City with his longtime partner L, teaching and writing. His medical crisis is sudden and inexplicable, leaving him suddenly alone in the ICU waiting for a resolution, thrown into a limbo state of not being able to eat or walk or sleep or even think all that clearly some of the time. In the novel, we sometimes follow every little detail of his interactions with a doctor or nurse, we sometimes follow his thoughts as they move through time. It is not a novel with chapter breaks or any breaks, really (an artistic choice I respect given the way everything bleeds together but which makes this a very hard book to read before bed!) without a real plot.

In the past, I have been surprised at how much I enjoy Greenwell's writing. Books with little plot and more of an emphasis on prose are often not my style. In his previous two novels what really won me over was the queer life and sex. In this book there is very little sex (maybe a normal amount for a normal novel, but his novels have never been normal when it comes to sex in the best way) but I still found myself captivated. Perhaps because sex is just the body and so much of this book is about the body.

Greenwell writes very realistic fiction, and here he depicts so specifically a time and place, the fears and joys of it, that it often feels less like a novel and more like you are actually present as it all unfolds. It's a truly impressive and important work, feels like something I would put in a time capsule as a way to communicate what it feels like to be alive right now.