Cleanness by Garth Greenwell is the sort of “novel” that makes me wonder why “literary fiction” almost always seems to be nothing more than pseudo-intellectual navel gazing narcissism. When did it become such an absolute chore to read?
I picked Cleanness randomly from online recommended reading shelves, the recommendations coming from someone who is supposedly smart about such things, an NPR or New Yorker pick. Probably the New Yorker since excerpts were previously published there, before being crammed together with other pieces published in other “literary” magazines, and it appears an attempt to capitalize on his early success on his first novel, which I’ve not read. While I understand the financial need to do so, something which has been probably true for writers ever since they began writing, it also helps clarify why many second novels flop. But perhaps there’s something deeper going on. Maybe it’s another example of writers with some talent pushing literature into creative new directions. Or maybe it shows just how out of touch the literati are with most readers and the majority of middle class readers.
Cleanness shows a mastery of the language, and moments are worth reading. I suspect those moments are different for each reader, depending on what you’re into. For example, the overly lengthy BDSM scene might be your thing. (All scenes are overly lengthy, so much so that you might feel beaten to death with the words.) For me, it was the initial scene when the narcissistic narrator engages in a coffee shop discussion with a student who is lamenting the loss of his lover. The gayness in this opening scene is beside the point. You can feel the hard edge, the open hurt, deeply felt by those of us fortunate to have been in love. The other scene was the first street protest, which surges along with the writing style well suited to imitate the surge of the crowd. The narrator is a literature teacher in Bulgaria where attitudes toward gay relationships are, as you might imagine, repressive. The protests are for or against something nebulous, but gay rights is an overriding theme in the book.
All secondary characters are identified with a letter, R. or N. or whatever, which seems to serve little purpose except perhaps to emphasize anonymity in the face of oppression, but mostly only emphasizes the already oppressive attention to the narrator, and to allow me to characterize it as an alphabet soup of characters swimming around in weak broth, which I very much appreciate.
Basically, I’ve become a reading masochist, able to wade my way through pages and pages of no paragraph steam of consciousness descriptions of the narrator’s feelings. And no, I’m not unsympathetic because it’s all about gay love. I even tried substituting “she” for he and reading it, discovering that the so-called story felt the same, a 200-plus page one-note effusion roiling out into the darkness like my wife’s snoring and exacerbating my insomnia. Perhaps it’s my fault, my age, my willingness to be as experimental in my reading as writers are in their writing. I’ve more time to read and thus more time to subject myself to books like Cleanness, then of course having to clean myself off with a lousy review like this one.
Lastly, since so much of this and other literary novels are from writers who publish in high class literary journals, it makes me wonder about their relevance, outside the academic literary world. Over the years, I’ve found a few stories in these journals that were excellent, but the vast majority of them were bafflingly lackluster and often read like tedious navel-gazing reflections, showcases for a good vocabulary, or strict workshop writing. Maybe it’s because the editors are usually academics? The echo chamber of the intellectually privileged? Maybe I just prefer a story with a punch line or a few twists and surprises, you know, something that requires thought that draws you into another world and doesn’t subject the reader to someone who just repetitively vomits emotions.
And the irony isn’t lost on me that this “review” is more about me as reader than it is trying to tell you what Cleanness is all about. I must be too dumb to truly understand its significance, but at least this review isn’t over 200 pages of gush.
