There’s a point about a quarter of the way through Garth Greenwell’s novel Cleanness where I began wondering if Greenwell’s choice of title was ironic. At that moment, the novel’s narrator — an American teaching in Bulgaria — has met another man for a physically and emotionally harrowing session of BDSM. And while everyone’s kinks are different, this particular scene walks a fine line between depicting kink and venturing into a much more unsettling place.
“I was used to being the stronger one in such encounters, being so tall and so large, I was used to feeling the safety of strength, of knowing I could gather back up that personhood I had laid aside for an evening or an hour. But he was stronger than I was, and I was frightened as he held me down and pressed against me, shoving or thrusting himself.”
Making matters even more emotionally thorny is that readers of Greenwell’s work have already encountered the narrator in his previous novel, What Belongs To You. There’s a kind of emotional identification that comes from experiencing the world through a first-person lens, and watching that perspective go through a deeply degrading sexual experience isn’t always easy. Greenwell writes with a meticulous attention to detail, but the events described in this particular section are the kinds of things that might make a William T. Vollmann or Mary Gaitskill protagonist pause and go, “That’s a little hardcore, dude.”
Hence the question of Cleanness as the title and, more broadly, where the concept of cleanness fits into this narrative. Thinking further about this, I find that the choice of Cleanness seems to be less about a sense of irony and more one of contrasts and paradoxes. For there’s something else at work across this novel, and while it’s not quite connected to the disjunction between the beauty of Greenwell’s prose and the emotionally and physically harrowing acts, it’s also not entirely removed from it.
What Belongs to You followed the American not long after he’d arrived in Bulgaria. There, he engaged in a complex relationship with Mitko, a man with a mysterious past and an unclear agenda. The dynamics within the relationship — both the balance of power between the two and the related financial element — heightened the complexity. There was a sense of immediacy that ran through the book, whether its protagonist was struggling to comprehend the nature of his connection with Mitko or exploring his relationship and upbringing in a conservative Southern family.
To describe Cleanness as a sequel to What Belongs to You doesn’t quite do it justice, though the two share a central character and a setting. They’re books with very different agendas, for all that they contain similar motifs; a somewhat apt comparison might be to Javier Mariás’s All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow. They’re connected, to be sure — but they’re using some of the same characters to explore very different things. In certain ways, Cleanness reads like the antithesis of What Belongs to You — turning nearly everything about its predecessor on its head.
Here, the narrator is nearing the end of his time in Bulgaria. Here, his interpersonal connections — whether romantic or platonic — are more fleeting. Here, certain massive life events take place in the margins; it’s only possible to detect them in their wake. Here, there’s a sense of certain barriers being placed between the reader and the narrative. Most of the characters are referred to by their first initial only; the second of the book’s three sections, “Loving R.,” documents the narrator’s idyllic relationship with R., but also leaves R.’s full name unknown. Some characters are referred only by their positions: another supporting character in the book is known only as “the writer.”
Cleanness follows the narrator as he makes his way through Bulgaria: he talks with his students, has sex, embarks on a relationship with R., finds that relationship threatened by a geographical separation, and prepares to wind down his time in the country. It’s episodic in nature and meticulously structured, with three sections of three chapters apiece. But for a novel whose immediacy is psychological, physical, and emotional, it’s also one in which certain significant events occur between the chapters.
That element of the novel also dovetails with some of the sociopolitical elements that Greenwell incorporates into the book. An understated but nonetheless unnerving aspect of Cleanness is the presence in the background of various reactionary elements. At one point, the narrator hears of an activist group that had announced an LGBT film festival, which was ultimately disrupted by homophobic violence.
“But even that was too much; on the second day a group of men barged in, they destroyed the television, they threatened anyone who came back. I mentioned this to him, saying it was terrible, outrageous, but he waved the words away. Those assholes, he said, it was just bullshit theater, the police were there the next day but they didn’t come back.”
This sense of ultraconservative violence creates a n aura of furtiveness; the lack of identifying details given to many of the characters can, at times, feel like the work of a narrator looking to work around the threats inherent in a surveillance state. To phrase it slightly differently, the use of initials rather than proper names feels less like a device and more like a defense. What at first could have seemed like a jarring contrast between the richly psychological and tactile aspects of the novel and the more terse, truncated elements in fact seems to establish a more dissonant resonance between the two.
The same could be said for the ways the novel can feel episodic. Greenwell’s approach is particularly distinctive in this respect: he’s fond of sentences that enumerate details and offer a sense of an ever-flowing narrative. But this isn’t a three-volume novel; instead, it weighs in at just over two hundred pages in length. This baroque prose style and the concise manner in which the narrative unfolds are seemingly at odds — but also beg the question of what else has been left out? This is, after all, a novel in which every character carries with them a sense of mystery and is fundamentally unknowable. And while the narrator’s mind is decidedly open to those of us who read his tale, these gaps suggest that there are things that even the reader may not know about him.
Near the end of “Loving R.,” the narrator muses on the nature of his relationship to R., and of the contrast between his own gut feelings and a more idealistic take on their love. Here, again, Greenwell is using contrasting elements to make his point — but he’s also offering a palimpsest for the novel as a whole.
“But what I felt for R. was different, it didn’t dissolve, and I wanted to believe in our language of boundlessness and the impossibility of change; to let it go would mean there had been bad faith, on one or both of our parts, maybe it isn’t fair to think that but I thought it.”
The phrase “our language of boundlessness” in particular seems relevant to Greenwell’s work, as “boundlessness” is certainly a quality that one could apply to Greenwell’s sentences. But there’s so much to be found in that one sentence: a roundabout autopsy of a relationship that hasn’t yet ended and a lifetime’s worth of experiences all condensed into a few dozen words.
Late in Cleanness, the narrator takes in a performance by a singer named Andrea. It’s a jarring moment in part because of the use of a name rather than an initial. (At the time, the narrator is out with N. and Z.) But its place in the narrative also helps suggest that this work is nearing its end: things are starting to change for the narrator, and this break from the convention that’s held up for so much of the book is as indicative as any epiphany he might have.
The idea of cleanness comes up in a more literal sense at various points in the novel, including during a sexual encounter late in the book — “he grabbed my hand and brought it to his mouth, cleaning it though it wasn’t dirty, he was immaculate, he had cleaned himself out before I arrived.” [At the very end, there’s another moment of contact that also involves questions of cleanness, albeit in a much more literal and non-sexual sense. It helps establish this novel’s final sentence, a contradictory and quietly ecstatic scene. Would it have the same power it does had Greenwell not so memorably chronicled the paradoxes and contradictions that led up until that point? I doubt it. As earned endings go, it’s thoroughly unexpected, yet also perfectly resonant. Given all that’s come before, that seems entirely appropriate.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on January 14, 2020, 240m pages, $26.00 hardcover]