Cleanness Paperback – January 12, 2021

In January 2021, the book group at The LGBT Center in NYC had a Zoom discussion with as many as 18 people, all in general agreement: This is a terrific book. We're not sure how he does it sometimes, but this book led to a full two-hour discussion (before we wandered off into our usual general chatter). A few readers didn't care for it (with its flowery descriptions, sometimes complex sentences, heavily blurbed cover, academic writing, and lack of quotation marks in the text), but most of us found this to be an amazing collection.Those of us who read it twice discovered that it's even richer the second time. Greenwell was trained as an opera singer and knows how to shape a song cycle, which is how he has described this collection, and how we felt about this often musical journey. The opening story about a student coming out, "Mentor," pairs nicely with the final story, "An Evening Out," when the narrator is preparing to leave Bulgaria and goes out with two students. The second story, "Gospodar," an S&M hookup, where the narrator is humiliated, is a near perfect mirror to the next to last story, "The Little Saint," where the narrator is the top. The third story, "Decent People," takes place at a Bulgarian protest and pairs with the third-from-last story, "Harbor," which also takes place with a group in Bulgaria.One reader complained that there wasn't enough connection between the stories, and that they seemed more like episodes or little explosions that illuminated the narrator’s life in Bulgaria, but I think that this is a brilliant way to view a collection of connected stories.The three middle stories, about his relationship with "R," divide the collection into the two halves.Greenwell, the author, insists that these stories are not autobiographical, but they are so emotional and specifically erotic, it's hard to imagine them to be fiction. But we'll refer to the main character as "the narrator," rather than "Garth."Originally, I had a hard time with the two "Bulgarian stories," but after our discussion, I appreciated them more, especially "Decent People, with the flow of the narrator's arrival at the protest, the protest itself - which was perfectly panoramic, especially in its depiction of near violence turning into song, his joining the gay group, and then waiting for something at the end. This is both a personal and a political process for the narrator, and he grows as part of this revolution. (We used the word "solipsistic," meaning to search and understand ourselves for meaning, feeling, and worth.) I'm still slightly confused by "Harbor," with too many characters and unclear motivation, even if it is about unidentifiable and unnamed forces. But I also acknowledge that these stories are necessary to complete the rhythms and fill the topics raised in the collection.Most of us, regardless of our personal predilections, found the two S&M stories hot. There's a lot of stasis without much plot, but small movements and events lead to very large emotions.A few people thought that the middle section, "Loving R.," was a bit maudlin (but not as sappy as the Mama Dog in the final story), but I think that we all fell for it (just as we all fell for Mama Dog). The relationship was full and moving, and brought up feelings and emotions for most of us.A few readers were moderately bothered by the use of initials (G., R., Z., and N.) for individuals. We discussed this as a European convention (old timey epistolary works, French 19th-century novels, Kafka, etc.), perhaps especially in S&M novels (thinking of "The Story of O" and "Last Tango in Paris," too). But we wish Greenwell had given his boyfriend a name. There's no reason to anonymize or occlude this significant relationship and it over-emphasizes the narrator's trouble with intimacy."Cleanness" takes place in Bulgaria, but it's not a travelog. We made the comparison to Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" several times and it seems that Greenwell has based his stories on these Isherwood stories in some way, with their political situations in the background and departure at the end. Similar to Isherwood's relationship to Germany, the narrator's relationship to Bulgaria seems like a metaphor for learning about oneself in a foreign setting before returning home.

A skillfully written connected short story collection, mostly in narrative form, that chronicles the life of an American English teacher living in contemporary Bulgaria. He resides two lives apart from where he is geographically; he is outside the local culture and society as a non-Bulgarian and he is gay in an illiberal and generally intolerant social environment.This leads to some wonderfully rewarding moments where friends and students dump their innermost thoughts and feelings in his lap as a "safe" confidant. But it also inflicts him with painful frustration when he cannot respond with total honesty of feeling because he is a often in teacher/student situations; and, he is a gay man who cannot risk the same kind of honesty and expose himself to rejection and loss of friendship.His only moments of truth are with online pickups that mostly involve dark fantasies without room for honest and affectionate interaction. His one real personal connection is transitory, with no future for an open gay relationship in the very conservative country.A reader can only reasonably conclude at the end of the book that the narrator should flee the hell he is in and find a place to live that truly fits his aspirations for an unconfined life.

First of all, some of this material is not suitable for readers under the age of 18, in my opinion. In particular, a chapter near the beginning of the book that is an explicit account of violent S&M sex that goes too far, and a later chapter of very explicit sex between the author and a self-destructive young man who begs to be abused. In my opinion these accounts tarnish the primary story of the author’s love affair with a Portuguese man while the two live in Sofia, Bulgaria, a beautiful love story that the author does not complete. Greenwell is a very talented author who writes beautiful, detailed descriptions of his characters and scenes, but alas the chapters don’t form a complete book. I would not label this a novel, but rather a series of vignettes or short stories. For me, this book was overrated and a disappointment. The author’s first book, What Belong To You, was better.

This is just what I love in a novel - complex yet relatable psychological depth, excellent prose, and a flow that pulls the reader in. The book does deal with very explicit sexual themes, which I found to be appealingly revelatory of character rather than merely salacious, causing me to relate to the dynamics of the feelings rather than to just be titillated. This is very good writing!

Cleanness is that rarest of literary accomplishments--a truly original and thoroughly engaging work of fiction. In nine short stories, Garth Greenwell stitches together the experience of an unnamed narrator who has lived and taught English to Bulgarian college students. The stories explore the confluence of desire and shame, pain and pleasure, attraction and revulsion. They are unapologetically queer, sometimes unapologetically pornographic and, always, very beautifully written.The narrator comes to know himself through sexual desire and encounters both brief and longterm. He also despises and rejects truths that unfold. In short he is, like all of us, an imperfect but loving bundle of neuroses looking for affirmation and gratification through physical and emotional connection. I was impressed by Greenwell's first novel, What Belongs to You but Cleanness is better still. It belongs in the first rank of literary fiction, exploring what it means to be queer.

Cleanness is captivating with its layers and depth, its strength and vulnerability. Greenwell's writing is unique.

If you love Milan Kundera and wanted to see what he would do with gay men, this is the kind of book, I feel, he would write. Having said that, in no way do I wish to dispossess the author of the originality of his craft. There’s something new and refreshing about Greenwell’s writing and imagination of being gay. Unlike other gay novels, it doesn’t start with the sadness of first love and being closeted or the usual tropes common in most queer fiction. It is a story of an American man who is in Bulgaria teaching Literature at school and he is gay and he knows it. In the politically charged space of the Southern European city, we find our narrator experimenting with his desires, experiencing love, the glory and tragedy of being pursued by pleasure and lust. Through unnamed, alphabetical characters, the author pushes the narrator beyond his limits; defying relations of power and making lives vulnerable at the cost of sexual pursuits. The novel is replete with well described scenes of sex throughout its length that says more than what it appears to show. This was a novel that explored desire among men, their sexuality, roles that divide power and the happiness or grief that accompanies it. Certainly, I am impressed with this work even though I found it a little slow in some parts. Nonetheless, I cannot wait to read other works by the author.

The title of this beautifully written novel comes from this revealing sentence (p97), spoken by the American professor who is narrating the book, "Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did." This is a good example of Greenwell's mastery of the sentence, its rhythm and cadences, which makes his novel such a special pleasure to read aloud.The sex he's talking about is gay sex, which is why, for the narrator, it was once infused with those negative qualities of shame and anxiety, qualities which, he implies, real love has the power to erase. The 'he' of the sentence is R, his lover, like all the characters in the novel represented only by a capital letter. Much of the story is about the transformative but ultimately fractured relationship the narrator has with him. It's a moving, joyous, sad, and horny relationship, which gives the book much of its emotive power. It proves that Greenwell is as capable of writing about tender love-making as he is about the transgressions of more violent, messy sex.Greenwell has written about the pleasures of writing about sex in an article in the Guardian Review (09.05.2020), and as this novel demonstrates he does it with powerful precision, never falling back on the tired tropes of erotic gay writing - everything is freshly imagined and in forensic detail. There are three aspects of sexual activity between men imagined here: a SM session between the American and a hook-up that goes wrong; a passionate and tender love session with R; and sex with an online sex-worker that brings out the savage, even homophobic, hidden being in our narrator. Each approach reveals something fundamental in terms of character, which might not otherwise come to light: this is one of the rationales for such writing, as Greenwell makes clear in his article. These scenes, or chapters, are visceral, handled with extraordinary skill.The novel is not linear, its structured around a number of evocative, significant incidents, spaced over a number of years, ending with a farewell, drunken party for the professor, thrown by his ex-students - he is leaving Bulgaria after seven years of teaching and of voluntary exile (incidentally, the least interesting of the stories). In trips to restaurants, on holiday in European cities, in hotel rooms, we learn a little of R's history, why he's so wary of coming out, why, ultimately, he seems lost. As they negotiate their break-up online, we see the American slide back into a life of casual sex, coming full circle. Their relationship, unable to weather the effects of long-distance, last two years, and the ending of it, the strains under which it exists, cast a melancholy haze over the whole book, giving it an attractive, mutely plangent tone. What the narrative brings out is the mutability of human relationships, their depths and fragilities, the distance that exists between people, which can be bridged only fleetingly by sex, more permanently, but elusively, by love.Greenwell is an important writer, not only for his unique take on gay experience, but for his handling of prose, for the uncanny insight he has into the nuances, the violence and tenderness of desire.

Many reviews have said it but I'll repeat it, there is something very poetic about Garth Greenwell's prose, I love it so much. Made me laugh, made me cry, what more could one want from a book?!

Wonderful prose, such evocative writing that I’m there, recalling my own lived experiences of life and love as our protagonist lurches through life. Not a story as such, more an examination of one man’s growing up. It is a sequel and would benefit from readers knowing the character from the first book but not essential. None of the characters continue on. Cannot wait to see what Garth does next. PS the cover is just stunning.