REVIEW: Garth Greenwell's Cleanness

by Franny Marzuki

Cleanness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

The praise surrounding author Garth Greenwell’s sophomore novel Cleanness is immense and well-deserved. Before his reading at Prairie Lights on January 27th, there was a sprawling four-minute introduction, largely taken up by the simple listing of publications that rated his book a most anticipated read for 2020. The sheer amount of reviews praising the book on its handling of themes as large as happiness or the slow rumination on the minute power of its sentences should indicate to everyone how exceptional this book is.

 Cleanness follows nine song cycles—as Greenwell defines them—sets of stories revolving around the same unnamed narrator and his life in Sofia, Bulgaria as a gay man. The heart of the story rests around a relationship between the narrator and a man referred to as R. While the arc of their relationship influences many aspects of the book’s stories, Cleanness also doesn’t hide from darker, more painful truths. Throughout the course of the book, the narrator navigates subtle and overt moments of Bulgarian homophobia, looking at life through various lenses. The narrator is at once a teacher and mentor, lover and poet, submissive and dominant, victim and survivor. It is throughout these perspectives that Cleanness takes its shape, concerned less with linear storytelling and more with the sharp impression of experience and truth.

“The narrator is at once a teacher and mentor, lover and poet, submissive and dominant, victim and survivor. It is throughout these perspectives that Cleanness takes its shape, concerned less with linear storytelling and more with the sharp impression of experience and truth.”

The structure of Cleanness is intentional, holding small arcs within larger ones. Divided into three parts with three stories each, the book almost creates a physical body in which it supports itself. The beginning and ending parts work around the central one, at once allowing the reader to see within to the center and allowing them to see beyond. From the opening story, the reader is already aware of the narrator’s grief surrounding a break-up with his ex-lover, R., but by the last, the book allows us to see beyond that grief as well. The second part – which is the only one given a title, “Loving R.” – follows the arc of R. and the narrator’s relationship, each of the three stories representing a beginning, a middle, and an end. The story in the exact heart of the novel, “The Frog King,” has the impossible task of holding the heart of the book, and it does so with breathtaking grace.

Another aspect central to the book’s progression is identity. By his very nature as an American in Bulgaria, the narrator feels a lingering estrangement from his surroundings. In the story “Decent People,” the narrator attends a protest happening in Sofia, walking with the crowd throughout the day into the night but refusing to engage in the chanting. “It wasn’t my country, would never be my country” the narrator offers as explanation, though he follows “but it had been my home, as close to home as anywhere” (50). There is an idea introduced here, one concerned with belonging.

 From the brief glances we get into the narrator’s childhood—often fleeting lines referencing a toxic relationship between father and son—the reader understands, because of his sexuality, the narrator was forcibly detached from the roots of family. Queerness exists as a marginal identity where the culture is one that every individual must seek out on their own, it is not one built on direct blood relation or heritage. To learn about the history of one’s identity, they must find it, which is always dangerous As Greenwell experienced: “I grew up in a place, where the only stories about what I could be were written by other people, by people who were not like me.” 

Through a character like G.—the narrator’s student struggling with his sexuality in the opening story—who writes in a way the narrator says is “of a sense that in the world he described there was nowhere he could feel at home” (7)—the reader sees feeling of otherness forced upon LGBT youth. Or through characters like R.— the narrator’s ex-partner—who struggles with the tension between his idealized life and reality, “it was hard for me to believe that R. would find in those countries, any country, the life he thought he wanted” (143). Greenwell speaks to these ideas during his conversation:

“The filth of homophobia, which absolutely is inside me, and I say this as someone who thinks and believes with every fiber of my being that everything I love about my life comes from queerness, everything that gives me joy comes from queerness, I love being a queer person. But I will never get to be someone who was not taught certain lessons about myself as a child. The question is not how do I erase that, how do I attain some state of cleanness before that filth was poured over me—there is no state of cleanness—the question is what can I do with it?”

The answer is of course to make art. Through Cleanness, Greenwell represents this internal struggle on the page, questions how to live in a homophobic society as a queer person. Through the narrator we hear an almost ironic exclamation of “Poetry!” when asked by his students what they can do when they feel hopelessness for their country. “That’s what poets can do, I said, poets and artists; they gives us ideas to buy into” (74), through art, the narrator is saying, filth of all forms can be made beautiful. 

As much as I can speak to the genius of Cleanness and the intricacies that resonated with me, no one can speak about it as eloquently and thoroughly as Greenwell. After being raised on opera and poetry, Greenwell speaks with delicate cadence that feels strikingly revealing. During his conversation with Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, a deeply thoughtful friend of Greenwell and Writer’s Workshop graduate (‘15), everyone packed into the second floor of Prairie Lights was enraptured by his words. Every moment felt like a revelation, a moment to behold in Greenwell’s mind. One moment that felt particularly striking was a comment on the necessity of art, a tried topic made new by Greenwell’s words:

“The whole reason I make art, is because there are things I need to think about and all of my other tools of thinking are inadequate. When I need to make art, it’s because something seems to me like a kind of void, a kind of abyss…If reason, if exposition can take me there, I don’t need to make art. I write because there are certain situations, certain questions, certain double-binds that when I look at them, I feel like I’m staring into the abyss and art is the tool I have for navigating the abyss”

Cleanness is a book about queerness, love, sex, and healing. The breadth of topics it touches and explores are impossible for one review to hold all of them. Again, Greenwell says it best: “[Cleanness] ends in a place that says cleanness is filth, filth is cleanness.”