Small Rain

Small Rain begins with pain so violent that it feels, the narrator says, as if someone "plunged a hand into [his] gut and grabbed hold and yanked." He is a poet in his forties living in Iowa City with his partner, L, and it is the first months of the Covid pandemic, so he is deeply reluctant to go to the hospital and tries to endure it at home until L persuades him. After hours in the emergency room and a battery of tests, he learns that he has an infrarenal aortic dissection, a tear in the inner layer of the aorta that usually strikes older people and can kill. Weeks of hospital follow, much of it in intensive care, where he has to learn to be powerless: to ask before using the bathroom, to walk without tangling the wires and lines that run from his body.

Garth Greenwell tells all of it in the first person, without dialogue, in long sentences and paragraphs that run for pages. Confined to bed, the narrator's mind travels: to his fractured family, to meeting L while he was a creative writing student in Iowa City, to the disastrous renovation of their house, to poems and music, to the staff who treat him and the failings of the health care system. By the end he is back outside the hospital, and the book has become, as Parul Sehgal wrote in the New Yorker, "a story of ordinary love, ordinary happiness."

This is a slow, exacting book about a body, and readers should expect needles, scans and blood draws described with documentary precision. Kirkus called it "autofiction," found "more suspense here than in Greenwell's previous work," and said he "transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life." Dwight Garner in the New York Times disagreed, finding that under its piling on of medical detail the book "listlessly drifts," and that it is short on humor. Readers who have spent time in a hospital bed, or beside one, will recognize every hour of it.