I had no knowledge of Garth Greenwell until I heard about this book on the NY Times Book Review podcast. From the way they discussed Cleanness, he struck me as a next-generation version of Dennis Cooper, and after reading this, I would say that is roughly 66% accurate. The writing style is quite different, and though the subject matter is relatively similar, it is more high-brow than low-brow, almost The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the gay version. I read that book many years ago and perhaps it is too charitable a comparison, yet that is what comes to mind.
There are no names. The narrator has no name and all other characters are only identified by a letter, or their occupation. The setting is Sofia, Bulgaria. If anything, this novel is a love letter to Bulgaria, certainly a country that many people often forget, or don't even know exists. Perhaps that regional element is what brings Kundera to mind, though Czechoslovakia is far from adjacent. Certainly the chapter "Decent People" brings to mind the political unrest that undergirds Kundera's work, a 2013 version of 1968 (so far as I can determine--I have almost no knowledge of such matters personally). So yes, a crass distillation, or equation, would be: Dennis Cooper + Milan Kundera = Garth Greenwell. At least for this volume.
Each chapter stands on its own as a short story. Individually, they range from very good to great. Collectively, while they certainly complement one another, they do not cohere as in a more traditional novel. The only throughlines are the narrator, the setting of Sofia, and R. And while the narrator's relationship with R. is the emotional center of the novel, roughly half of the novel does not concern R., except as a memory and symbol of heartbreak, the most perfect sort of love the narrator has experienced, and the longing for something as powerful that may never come to pass.
The plot is basic: the narrator is an American writing instructor teaching in Bulgaria, for seven years, perhaps. There are three graphic sex scenes, pornographic with an intellectual undercurrent, and there is the melancholy love affair with R. There are also several scenes with current and former students which are basically innocuous, to varying degrees. The ultimate strength of this book is its honesty. The reader never gets the sense that the narrator is sanitizing his desire. There are romantic elements, certainly, but there is nothing in it that feels false, or phony. The tension between outward respectability and inward depravity is carefully and thoughtfully detailed. There are many praiseworthy elements of the novel; my only critique is that the ending feels anticlimactic, and unsettled--though the final image on the last page is quite moving.
It is perhaps worth noting how different the first chapter, "Mentor," feels from the rest of the novel. It may turn some readers off, and it almost feels a little unfair that Greenwell is able to get away with breaking so many rules of dialogue:
"There were more people in the restaurant now, and G. lowered his voice as the booths around us filled and the air grew thick with smoke. I was leaning forward to hear him, and it occurred to me that he had brought me here for the added privacy of it, the privacy of the booth and his lowered voice but also the privacy of the language; at any of the brighter cafes on the boulevards we would have heard English but here no one else was speaking it, and we were alone in that way too. I didn't think of B. as special then, not really, he said, speaking of the boy who was also in my class, whom I thought of as G.'s particular friend; we were all equally friends, the four of us, but B. and I had always been in the same classes, in eighth and ninth grade, and then the next year they put us in different sections. It shouldn't have mattered, he said, we were good students, we didn't talk in class or fool around, and we still had our time together as a group. But it did matter, he said, I couldn't stand it. I made them switch me, I said that I hated the other students, I said they were cruel to me. It wasn't true but I made my mother believe it, I made her come to the school to complain, and after a few days they put me where I wanted to be. Everything should have been fine then but it wasn't fine, I knew that it shouldn't have made me so upset, I couldn't understand why it had. But that's not true, he said, shaking his head just slightly, I did understand, at least a little, I knew I felt something I shouldn't feel." (13)
Now that passage isn't that confusing, but later on when G. tells the story of how B. and their other two friends (one of them a girl) rent a cabin for a senior summer trip, and how he and B. were sleeping next to one another, and how when he woke up alone, the other friend told him that B. and the girl had hooked up the night before, and the feelings that brought out, it's tedious at the very least. Grammatically, it does hold together, but it is yet another contemporary novel that finds quotation marks to be a limiting concept and a nuisance. It's not like this is Ulysses; also Kurt Vonnegut would not approve of the heavy semicolon use.
If readers can get past "Mentor," they next need to contend with "Gospodar," which is perhaps the most "hardcore" scene in the novel. After these two, the reader will know how "challenging" the work is, while it smooths down the rougher edges and mostly lightens up the rest of the way. Do you really want an excerpt from "Gospodar?" Do I really want to try to set a new bar for obscenity on Flying Houses? Okay...
"He returned his hand to my head and gripped me firmly again, still not moving, having grown very still; even his cock had softened just slightly, it was large but more giving in my mouth. And then he repeated the word I didn't know but that I thought meant steady and suddenly my mouth was filled with warmth, bright and bitter, his urine, which I took as I had taken everything else, it was a kind of pride in me to take it. Kuchko, he said as I drank, speaking softly and soothingly, addressing me again, mnogo si dobra, you're doing very good, and he said this a second time and a third before he was done." (35-36)
And that is just from the consensual part of the encounter.
"Decent People" is the protest chapter, and it certainly felt relevant to me in the political moment we are having in this country, and yet I could not fully understand the nature of it. Perhaps this is another failing of the book: it asks too much of the reader. Not all of us are fluent in foreign affairs or post-U.S.S.R. societal restructuring. The emphasis is on the love and unity that flows through the crowd, and the danger that others fear it will foment. While there are a few nice moments, it is mainly about the narrator meeting up with some other academic friends and students, and the whirlwind of the scene around them. Frankly it is more boring than the first two, and yet leaves me wanting more exposition to provide a deeper understanding.
After these, the novel shifts to Part II, Loving R., which is 64 pages long and the highlight of the novel (like the first part of Asymmetry, if less substantial). These three chapters represent the most conventional elements of the novel and are more emotionally affecting than anything else in it. It made me feel lonely and sad, thinking of travels I wanted to take with a friend, as they mostly concern a trip to Bologna and Venice. These chapters exude sweet melancholy, and the twin burdens of loss and past happiness remembered:
"And he did find it [San Marco], finally, by luck mostly, I think, suddenly we turned and it opened out before us, after the cramped alleys the expanse of the square, beyond it the horizon of water. R. turned to me, smiling, and surely it wasn't at that moment that the bells began to ring, it's a trick of memory to stage it that way, but it is how I remember it, the birds flying up, everyone turning to the Campanile, as we did, its top still bright as it caught the last of the sun. Merchants were walking through the crowds, hawking toys for children, spinning tops that burst into LED color as they helicoptered up. All that was new there was evanescent, the toys, the tourists, R. and I; all that was lasting was old, worn dull with looking though I still wondered to look at it, the centuries-old basilica, the bells, the gold lion on its pedestal, the seat that would swallow it; and everywhere else the books I had read, so that look, there, I could almost convince myself of it, Aschenbach stepping from uncertain water to stone." (123-124)
While the final chapter, "An Evening Out," nearly approaches the level of Part II, it is passages like this that elevate the novel into the territory of high-art. Greenwell tempers the discordant and repelling themes of the narrative with the sort of depth of feeling and humanity that prove revelatory to the reader. And yet while this novel has many virtues, it is uneven, it is quite imperfect. And perhaps that is partly intentional, for on the whole I enjoyed the novel very much. But because I write for other readers (though in practice mostly for myself), effusive praise felt untrue, and so I recommend the book with this caveat, knowing that many readers will simply never experience it for discomfort with its subject matter.
Grade: B
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