A review by foggy_rosamund
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

3.0

A collection of interlinked short stories about an unnamed American narrator who teaches in a school in Bulgaria, this is reminiscent of Greenwell's first collection, What Belong to You, but not as good. Greenwell is concerned with relationships, the unknowable natures of other people, the loneliness of modern life, and the conflicts within gay relationships. The world he writes about is shabby, full of hopelessness, people with no work and no prospect of work, and limited chances for happiness or self-expression. This feeling is compounded by the homophobia of Bulgarian society, and Eastern Europe more broadly. In Greenwell's first book, there is a great tenderness towards the male body, and towards the love between two men, but this is less evident in Cleanness. Instead, there's a sense of alienation and of self-loathing. Though sex is central to Greenwell's work, only two of these nine stories deal with sex in depth: Gospodar and The Little Saint, which are in some ways mirror images of one another, as one is about the experience of being submissive in a BDSM scenario, and one is about being dominant. They deal with sex in explicit, finely focused detail, and Greenwell's work is careful and insightful, but Greenwell didn't push the stories far enough, didn't allow his characters to experience a depth of emotion or reflect on their experiences. The stories felt rushed, unlike the work in What Belong to You, in which the sex is a careful culmination of Greenwell's understanding of the body and the challenges of intimacy. Greenwell's narrative voice is compelling, and his work has many moments of pathos and originality, but there were more false notes here than I expected from him.