To Linger in the Wisdom of Doubt

Alessia Degraeve reviews Garth Greenwell’s “Small Rain.”

By Alessia DegraeveSeptember 23, 2024

• Fiction

SMALL RAIN BEGINS: a visceral pain, hours fraught with vulnerable bewilderment. An unnamed narrator—a poet, a teacher, a middle-aged man living in Iowa—drives himself to the hospital after wrestling for days with a wrenching agony in his chest.

In a series of liminal spaces—waiting rooms and doctor’s offices, long hallways, and hospital beds—the narrator reflects on a life that has become, at some indeterminable point, his life: a writer’s life, an obdurate life, a life suspended between a search for meaning and a confrontation with its lack. Garth Greenwell’s new novel records a sick man’s frightening realization that, all the while, time has been passing, and rapidly. He now faces the freedom, but also the prison, of living the life he has created. His torn aorta precipitates a coming into consciousness.

Once in the hospital, his illness places him on exhibit. He becomes a problem to be solved, a body to be learned from. After his first night in the ICU, he wakes from a drug-induced slumber to a huddle of medical students watching him. They’ve been shadowing the unit’s vascular resident. His fingers immediately move to his face; he tries to comb his hair and wipe off his mouth. He initially frames these movements as mere “reflexes of presentability” but soon realizes they are “a way of clinging to life.” Vanity provides its own comfort. “I could still care about unessential things,” he says. An ill person clings to vanity in an attempt to hold on to the identity they had before they were dying; this struggle with vanity, the narrator suggests, is a struggle for vitality. It’s a reach for beauty, which is itself a reason to live, to stay alive.

For the narrator, beautiful language is a life source. Even as he receives the news that a piece of his heart has torn, he appreciates the aesthetic brilliance in the language of the diagnosis:

The artery has three layers, she said […] and what has happened to you is a tear in the inner layer, [which] creates something like a flap that then blood flows around, making what is called a false lumen—false lumen, I thought, such a beautiful phrase—the blood going where it shouldn’t go.

Lumen is more metaphorical than the other Latin word for light, “lux,” which is semantically simple. “Lumen” is semantically composite: it’s formed from a verb stem and a verb ending. The word reaches for action, and it evokes a kind of shining outwards. So the false lumen, then, is a luminous opening gone awry—a remarkable oxymoronic image, an opening that is also a trap. There’s beauty also in the sonic cadence of the phrase. “False lumen” almost blurs together: fal-slu-men, especially if said quickly, sounds like falls-through-man, which is of course what the phrase describes, “the blood going where it shouldn’t go.” The narrator finds consolation in turning his attention towards the beauty of the phrase, a beauty that offsets, if only for a moment, the terror of his torn heart. He has made beauty from dread; he has found some life in death.

When the narrator meets his primary nurse in the ICU, he moves through a process of sonic association, the alliterative “al-” sound taking him from an abstract name to the life force: “Her name was Alivia, with an A, she said, as she wrote it on the whiteboard; Alivia, alleviate, allegory, alive, I thought.” The process is innate; it happens without thought or calculated concentration. This alliterative list functions as a miniature list poem. We take special note of its order: “alleviate” comes immediately, a plea; then “allegory” in the middle, the link, a meaning to be revealed; finally, “alive” at the end, the final goal. The small list poem is generated from the propulsion of language alone; it is not deliberately measured or considered. It is a record of the immediate and generative beauty that language provides.

Greenwell doesn’t use dialogue but filters it instead through first-person narration. Language, and the glorious music within it, is a mechanism he uses to stabilize himself; it is the cord that connects him to life. He holds onto it with the urgency of a person attempting to save themself:

[The doctor’s] name was Ferrier […] It was the name of one of my favorite singers, Kathleen Ferrier […] [O]ne of the first CDs I bought as a teenager, just after I discovered music, classical music I mean, was a recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and three of the Rückert lieder, the first of which became a kind of talisman for me, important in a way I was only just beginning to understand art could be important.

Dr. Ferrier’s name triggers a sonic recognition—the narrator drifts away from the hospital room narrative, this reminiscence taking him away from the brutality of his present, the surgeon who presses her fingers into his chest, who examines his wreckage, digging for pain. “How can I say what it did to me, it unmade me, unmade and remade me around itself somehow,” he says. Remembering Mahler, the experience of hearing that awesome lieder for the first time, saves him from the body that betrays him.

The narrator contemplates death and the best way to die: “I would want to be alone too, I thought, when it came I wanted to be alone with death too.” He seeks privacy in misfortune. Gawking sympathy doesn’t serve him; he finds it profoundly othering. In offering sympathy, one affirms their distance from the unfortunate state. I’m so sorry this happened to you, they say. In offering their sympathy, they make themselves feel better. At least I did what I could to make it better for them.

The narrator’s illness functions as a poetic constraint. The restrictions it places on his privacy—and on his comfort, mental clarity, and time with loved ones—act in the way rhyme, meter, and poetic form do. They constrain the mind of the artist, limiting his scope; he must develop new avenues to beauty.

The narrator observes and examines acts of care and the exquisite gratitude and inherent guilt they evoke within us. Perhaps the most beautiful part of the novel is when a shared love for music dissolves the professional distance between the narrator and Frank, his emergency room nurse. In the hospital, you must place your life in the hands of a series of humans who save lives for a living; their care allows you to continue living, and yet it’s considered lucky if you never have to see them again. The odd precarity of the relationship between patient and caretaker is a lens through which Small Rain explores human interdependence. When the narrator first meets Frank, he pleads to him, almost unconsciously; he tells him he hasn’t been to the hospital since childhood, wielding this as some kind of proof. But Frank responds only “with a platitude of some kind, you’re in good hands, something like that, they’ll get you out of here as quick as they can.” Frank maintains distance, the way any caretaker should. He will treat hundreds, maybe thousands, of patients in his lifetime, no time to get to know them all. He will do his best to help but he will do no more than that.

Frank invites small talk; he asks about the narrator’s profession. Suddenly, remarkably, the two connect over music; Frank plays in a band, and the narrator used to be a vocal performance major. And more than this, they both love early choral music, and share a moment in which they coalesce within the intimate experience of listening:

You’ve got to hear this, he said, he had pulled his phone from the pocket of his scrubs and was scrolling though his music, it was an old recording of Taverner’s mass but he had just discovered it. […] There was a moment of silence then, a pause while the song loaded, and then a solo tenor voice filled the room, tinny on the phone’s speakers but still beautiful […] It was a warm voice, full of light. Frank had come close to the bed, aiming his phone at me, and he leaned toward me, too, bending his head so we could listen together.

It’s so tender, this unmediated human excitement, an innocent joy, that leads Frank to break protocol, change his demeanor, become undone in a way, suddenly more himself than he was before. And I love the silence before the song, how the two wait, suspended in anticipation of sonic puncture. They’ve each heard it before, but now they hear it together, their independent experiences conjoined.

I also admire the way Greenwell communicates the narrator’s own childlike surprise—“and he leaned toward me, too”—as if to say, Can you believe it? It’s precisely this nonessential human-to-human connection that he’s been missing in the hospital, where every touch is sterile, aimed only at utility. Frank wants to “listen together”—the scene tracks the dissolution of the stilted distance between patient and caretaker, a moment that attests to art’s penetrating access into human tenderness.

The novel’s only mention of its title comes during this same conversation with Frank. “I was surprised by how well I remembered the tune,” the narrator says. “It was one of my favorite poems, authorless, mysterious, the first two lines unparsable: Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne.” The oddity of the phrase “smalle rayne” enchants the narrator: “small” is a such a “weird adjective,” an unusual way to describe rain. The poem’s syntax is odd too—it is inverted, which places emphasis on the direction of the rain, “downe can Rayne,” instead of the normal can rain down. And for what? What does the inversion symbolize? Desire? Acceptance? Frustration? The phrase itself is a vestige of emotion, interesting for its impermeability. Literature holds the powerful capacity to probe the opaque for meaning but also to protect the meaning of the opaque.

“[I]sn’t the poem more beautiful for it,” the narrator pointedly wonders, “for the difficulty, for the way we can’t quite make sense of it”? Complexity holds literary and aesthetic value, Greenwell argues. It invites rereading, more alive somehow, for it buzzes with the contained energy of a riddle whose solution has been lost. We can craft and argue an elaborate solution, and hope that it’s true. But the point is not definitive truth; it’s relative truth. The truth revealed in literary criticism is intimate—how we answer the riddle reveals what we were hoping to find.

“It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel,” the narrator continues. “[I]t had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once.” Searching for the answer to the unanswerable, as writers and readers do, bears an inescapable sense of futility, not only within a world that does not economically incentivize artistic practice but also for the artist, who, wading in complexity, loses faith in his own pursuit of beauty. But there is beauty, the novel says, in speculation, in what our speculation can reveal to us about ourselves. “It had been my whole life,” the author repeats, a realization, a reckoning with the writer’s life, the writer’s wisdom, never a practical wisdom, always a speculative one. But the speaker’s search for meaning through linguistic beauty is what makes this whole book possible: the novel we hold in our hands is the beautiful product of this speculative superfluousness.

The narrator’s poetic criticism exposes him to himself. What he finds in the poems of others shows us what he has been searching for in himself. Take, for example, his fixation with George Oppen’s poem “Stranger’s Child.” His focus blurred by oxycodone, the narrator is unable to read it properly in the hospital. Still, he’s drawn to the poem. He stares at it, eyes glazing over the words for hours on end. The poem has always been impenetrable, he tells us. It has always been particularly tough to teach. It’s a poem about which he “didn’t have anything to say, or nothing that captured why it was wonderful.” The poem does not seek clarity; it probes complexity. Oscar Wilde says the highest criticism “deals with art, not as expressive, but as impressive purely.” This is what the narrator does: he avoids offering a definitive analytical conclusion on the mysterious poem. Instead, he makes art from art, chronicling a new impression of the poem’s final stanza: “The sparrow’s feet, / Feet of the sparrow’s child touch / Naked rock.” Here, what was earlier in the poem a “cobbled street” is now just “naked rock”—it has become unmade, unshaped; it is now eternal, natural, is now a raw piece of earth, is now unbound by human artifice. It is this mode that the narrator is drawn to, in his illness, himself raw and unmade:

Oppen doesn’t plead for sentiment […] there’s something irremediable there, in that naked rock the child has to stand on, in this poem he sent to the daughter he loved; and there was something weirdly that comforted me, that time in the bed, when I was unable to get up, to walk around the ward or even move to the chair. The irremediability of it was a comfort, that he had seen it and faced up to it, and in facing up to it made this poem.

Once again, the narrator admires how the poem recognizes opacity as its own kind of meaning. As his reading makes clear to us, he has been looking for reflections of the unfixable, the unexplainable. This has been experienced before, the poem says to him: find comfort in my lack of comfort, in my stoic confrontation with what is and with what cannot be. The “naked rock” is comforting because it lacks comfort.

The narrator examines the visceral helplessness inherent within acts of care; so often, we feel we don’t deserve the kindnesses we are given. There’s an inherent guilt, Greenwell suggests, in asking another to be responsible for your life, for whether you live or die. “I didn’t want to be difficult or imperious, I wanted them to take good care of me, which was their job I knew, and still it felt like something I had to deserve,” the narrator says after receiving bad-quality care from a thoughtless temporary nurse who didn’t administer his medicinal routine properly. To be alive, the scene demonstrates, is to constantly defend ourselves from faulty care. Of course, quality is what he deserves. He’s a paying customer. But advocating for himself feels like making a fuss, being difficult, causing a scene. He is at the mercy of their attention, at the whim of the nurse who is randomly assigned to save his body. It’s a feeling remarkably similar to the condition of childhood, which carries the same helplessness, the same guilt over one’s inescapable dependency.

There’s a remarkable scene where the narrator speaks to the owner of the company repairing his house—he’s afraid the man is scamming him, and already he’s given him more money than he has to give. The company owner is his opposite: gruff, macho, a country boy. The two get into a tiff over a botched job, and the narrator purposely uses intellectualized speech to ask him to make things right. He strikes a nerve—the man yells, twisting in rage:

I had triggered something in him, something I had said or my tone, my way of drawing myself up in language, of taking on my father’s voice, officious, authoritative; whenever we do that it’s to make the other person feel small, the man was right, but I hadn’t wanted to make him feel as small as this.

We see here how acutely aware the narrator has become of the little child inside of himself, the one that’s always been afraid of becoming his father. His art form, precise language, can be weaponized too, sharpened, to slice the listener, to cut them in a way they don’t understand, in the way a condescending parent does to a child. The humiliating language he uses here is the kind he has inherited from his father—he strikes with the weapon that wounded him. He recognizes the “particular flavor of humiliation” from childhood because he has experienced it himself. It’s sour, a sweetness ignored and left to curdle. The narrator has lived his whole life trying to escape certain curdled loves. There’s a wonderful turn here: the young boy inside the narrator makes eye contact with the young boy inside the gruff man: “I felt I could see straight through to his childhood, it must be something he had felt many times, a particular flavor of humiliation, any anger I might have felt melted away.” He bows his head to the contractor, an apology, but also a softening.

The novel spends a significant amount of time pondering childhood, those defenseless years we spend exposed to our parents’ attempts to raise us, so inevitably imprinted by the mold of our parents’ own youth, for it is difficult to give to a child what you were not given as a child. The narrator’s illness returns him to a kind of youth: “I was like a child again,” he says, “having to think about motions that had long been automatic, what a little time it takes to part us from the life we knew.” The second half of this sentence serves a double function: we can be drawn away from the customary pleasures of our lives in just a second, but everything also brings us back to childhood, to the blueprints of the lives we now live. Greenwell draws close attention to the lingering ghost of childhood; the novel explores growing up as a means of grappling with those generational insufficiencies that accumulate and form our insecurities.

Much of the magnificence of Small Rain lies at the level of the sentence. Greenwell’s sentences discover themselves along the way, unpredictable variations on a crescendo. In one example, the narrator describes how his hospital bed is wheeled through the crowded hospital en route to a new screening room. “They made way for us, staring at me and then looking away; I was a spectacle, a little mobile disaster, of course their eyes were drawn to me, I resented it but also I understood.” A small phrase begins, and then another phrase branches out from it; then, suddenly, a stark declaration, which is built upon, then built upon again, amounting in another declarative, which is then quickly refuted, so that the final phrase nestles into contradiction, an unexpected landing pad. The narrator is at once the observed and the observer—“I resented it but also I understood”—realizing that he can hate this feeling while recognizing it is merely a natural consequence of his position. Greenwell’s prose honors the simultaneity of emotion; it exists in a state of superposition, angry yet understanding, needy yet independent. He displays an incredible propensity for negative capability, a phenomenon Keats describes as the writer’s ability to preserve “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It does not pretend to know why it is feeling as it is feeling. Greenwell’s sentences constantly modify themselves, tracking the process of contemplation, not completion. In this way, the novel honors complexity—it lingers, gratifyingly, in the wisdom of doubt.