Cleanness

"One unmissable work of literary fiction not long out is Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, the follow up to his lyrical, rapturously received 2016 debut, What Belongs to You . As with the earlier book, Cleanness is a portrayal of an American expat living as a gay man in conservative Sofia – his alienation and struggle to form long-term relationships – and it unfolds by way of episodic vignettes. Greenwell writes with absolute candour, and in prose so elevated as to have spawned its own sub-genre of literary analysis. (If you like that sort of thing, I recommend Christian Kiefer on Greenwell’s “remaking of grammar in his own image” on Lithub .) Greenwell says he thinks of himself as more of a poet than a novelist, and certainly Cleanness is infused with a poet’s sensibility. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Standout debuts from January include Kiley Reid’s bestselling Such a Fun Age – a funny and accomplished social satire examining race and privilege through the eyes of a young black babysitter and her employer, which will make good discussion fodder for book clubs – and Irish writer Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground , an unsettling tale of father-daughter witchdoctors that twines magical realism together with horror."

"Greenwell’s novel (although it could equally be described as a collection of short stories, or a series of vignettes, or – as he has described it in the past – ‘a lieder cycle’) portrays an unnamed American man living and teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. Autobiographical, in the loosest sense, it is a portrait of a gay man navigating a life in an often homophobic country, forging intimate connections, and bearing witness to political and social upheaval. Cleanness is perhaps most notable for its portrayals of queer sex, which are delicately but unflinchingly written, and suffused with unspoken questions of trust, vulnerability and power. In parts, we are invited to share in our protagonist’s humiliation, as he is truly laid bare upon the page. Desire, in Greenwell’s book, is a strange and shapeshifting creature which spits at and scratches its owner. “Sex is … at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come,” as he has written . “In no other activity, I think, do the physical and metaphysical draw so near one another.” Quite. It’s a clear, calm and rather beautiful book that I admire a great deal."