A Conversation with garth greenwell

By Patrick Nathan

In 2015, when no one knew what Twitter was doing to democracy, I asked my little corner of the book world what new novels there were on the horizon, as I was hungry to write an essay. I then received a DM from someone I didn’t know, a writer named Garth Greenwell whose debut novel, What Belongs to You, would appear in January 2016. As it turned out, I did write about it — after reading it three times — but not before Greenwell rocketed into the stratosphere of American fiction upon that book’s release. An instant critical success, What Belongs to You was also a finalist that year for the National Book Award, and appeared on every magazine’s “best of” list. It wasn’t long before the novel was adapted as a stage play, and then as an opera — a staggering success for an extremely gay novel that begins with the narrator on his knees before a nice, plump cock in a dingy public restroom.

Greenwell followed with Cleanness in 2019, a kind of thematic extension of his debut, though — as we note below — done in a different musical style. Then, in 2024, he published Small Rain, which has once again been hailed as one of the year’s best novels — and deservedly so. I loved it so much I ended up writing another essay. This didn’t quite scratch my itch, apparently, because I also reached out to Greenwell to see if he’d be free for an interview.

As I suspected, Greenwell is a delight. His intelligence seems effortless and his sentences unspool like silk, but there’s always an element of play in his thoughts. We talked about how fiction is offensive, how synesthesia guides what we write, and how fiction can affix or focus meaning in a dispersive world. This conversation was recorded over the phone in early October of 2024.

Garth Greenwell

Hello.

Patrick Nathan

Hello. It’s wonderful to hear your voice. I’ve never actually heard it before.

Is that true?

I think. I don’t know. We’ve never met.

Oh my gosh, I think that’s true.

Yeah, I think we’ve only ever emailed.

Well, it’s nice to make your voice acquaintance.

Yes — and nice to verify that, from the sound of it, we’re both fags.

[laughs] Amazing.

First, I think you got the idea — I really did love this book. I enjoyed reading it a lot. And I really think you took your work in a different and new direction, and it was very exciting to read. Congratulations on everything! It’s getting such great press and attention and is well deserved.

Thank you so much.

Of course. Now that I feel like I’ve earned it: can I be a little annoying?

Of course.

This novel takes place during the Delta variant in 2020. While it’s very much not a Covid novel, I think it might nevertheless be a pandemic novel. One of the primary experiences of the pandemic was grief in some form, and it’s a grief that — in this country anyway — we’re told is useless or something we should leave behind, something we shouldn’t honor. I feel like Small Rain really does honor the idea of having lost something. I was wondering, because a lot of your work is informed by autobiography — I’m not calling it “autofiction,” don’t worry — but because of this relationship your work has with your life, when did you realize or even believe that you would transform this experience into Small Rain?

It really happened with the two lines from Louise Glück that are quoted in the final pages of the novel [“Earth was given to me in a dream / In a dream I possessed it”]. I felt like I would not be able to make anything out of the experience of having been in the hospital until I was walking around the neighborhood with my partner, something we did every day, something my doctors wanted me to do every day.

Walking around the neighborhood, those two lines, which I had no idea existed in my head, floated up and somehow made the book possible. They made me feel that there was a shape that could contain some fictional version of what I’d undergone. That’s very mysterious to me, but it happened several weeks after I got out of the hospital. I started writing quickly after that, and, despite some significant breaks, kept writing for the next three years.

PN
Since you mentioned the Glück quote, I feel like I can ask my O’Hara question. The Glück quote is, as you say, right at the end, but the book is peppered throughout with allusions and quotations like these — some of which you list in the back. And on page 125, you have this line: “All I want is infinite love.” Immediately I was like, why not “boundless”? I want to know what guided your decision making in threading these foundlings into the narrative.

Oh, that’s so interesting. Certainly, I was thinking of O’Hara there. But there are other places as well, such as a Frank Bidart poem that’s conjured but not quoted. I didn’t put the O’Hara in the acknowledgments, but I did put the Bidart. Where I wanted a direct quote and where I wanted the aura of a quote, that was really a question of moment to moment feel. I knew at that moment that many readers would think of O’Hara, and I was thinking of O’Hara too. I don’t know why I said infinite instead of boundless. I guess the direct quote felt too heavy for me in that moment. But I don’t know exactly why that is.

Oh wait, maybe I know. The previous sentence is “… that didn’t invalidate what I felt but demarcated it, it set a boundary, that made it finite but didn’t make it unreal.” But then I guess you have “finite” and “infinite love.” I don’t know — I find this decision-making so interesting.

Me too. And, you know, for me it’s not strategic. It’s… I don’t want to say instinctive because that’s not exactly right, but it’s about feel. For some reason, the finite/infinite repetition didn’t bother me, but boundary/boundless would have annoyed me.

Do you hear anything when you start putting these sentences together? Do you hear where you’re missing a word?

Hearing” isn’t quite the right sense. It’s more kinetic. There is a way that I really do feel syntax — I mean I really do think it’s synesthetic. I feel syntax in this physical, kinetic, embodied way. It’s funny because I think about music so much when I’m writing, but in terms of the shapes of sentences I think more in terms of texture and movement and embodied gesture than I do of sound. Certainly, in the sense of euphony or something.

This is fascinating.

GG
You’re such an attentive reader to note that, and such an excellent writer yourself. These are really interesting questions.

It’s just something that I love to think about, when you can really tell someone has cared about what they’re writing.

That’s right.

I want to know how that presents itself in the writer’s head. My drafts are full of brackets that say “missing word,” or I’ll put a word there that doesn’t make any sense but has the right scan or meter. It’s totally the wrong word, it’s nonsense, but I need to figure out what the right one is. It’s strange how everyone works. And it’s just wonderful how strange that is.

That’s so interesting and I agree.

This is verging on the annoying process question, but when you’re writing — when you begin writing something like Small Rain — do you have this kinetic sense of what kind of shape it’s going to be? On how this shape is going to guide the narrative? The reason I asked about music is because I feel like your work always takes a musical shape. Do you have that in mind when you start?

No. I don’t. If the Louise Glück line convinced me that there was a shape, I felt a lot of anxiety about actually finding that shape. I am someone who works sentence to sentence. I don’t remember at what point I realized it was going to be in five sections — that wasn’t something I knew early on. I spend a lot of time feeling out material sentence by sentence. I don’t work by a plan or outline — I wish that I did, but that’s not how I work. When I think about the structure of the novel, I think about chord progressions. Probably just because music was my first training in art and in how to organize aesthetic experience. In that sense, music is a part of what allows me to feel out a shape.

I would say that What Belongs to You is very much a symphony, and Cleanness variations on a theme. It’s interesting to hear you say you were in the dark on this one for a while because it is the first one of yours where I didn’t immediately get the sense that this is a specific kind of performance.

Right. Well, this is the first book that I wrote properly as a book. This is the first time that I started a book telling myself I was writing a novel. The first two books I really sort of tricked myself into writing a novel or a book length work of fiction.

I like what you say about What Belongs to You. The first title was actually Three Movements, which is still for me kind of the secret true title of that book. It was the one change my agent insisted on before sending it out into the world. But I really do think of that book as a chamber symphony.

This is so fascinating — this aspect of intentionality, of it being the first you set out from the beginning to write as a novel — because, while you’ve already been a great stylist, I really thought while I was reading Small Rain that level of the work rose to the style. It has such a unity to it. It made me think of the art of fiction itself, which I noticed you were hinting at right away on page 12 when you say, “There was something terrible about watching people around me, terrible and irresistible, I wanted to see into their lives but I had no right to; it was an intrusion, like looking into the lit windows of houses at night.” It struck me, this idea of watching people. I don’t know if commentary is the right word, but you seem to be hinting at the idea of fiction. Do you think there’s something transgressive about fiction?

Well, I wonder if “transgressive” is exactly the word I’d use. I mean I guess there is something always offensive in fiction, in the sense of fiction always offending, always being a source of offense. I think there is something offensive to us in representation itself. One thing that’s often left out of what sometimes seem to me facile conversations about the relationship between art and morality is the fact that I don’t think it’s possible to perceive another person without infringing upon their sovereignty in some way. The making of art is a kind of magnification and glorification of that infringement upon another’s sovereignty. There is something offensive to me, to my sense of dignity, in someone else thinking about me, someone else making any kind of narrative or commentary about me, or perceiving me at all. Which interests me! It seems to me that conversations about the relationship between art and morality should begin there, that there is no possibility of purity in art, there is no possibility of moral immaculacy when we’re trying to represent the world and people in it.

Right. You’re always going to step on something or someone. I’ve always thought of it as a consumptive metaphor. You have to eat. Art has to eat. Which doesn’t mean there’s no gratitude in it, or there’s no sense of wanting forgiveness, per se, but it does seem to have to happen. I like that. That leads into another question I have. You talk a lot about social media, twitter, the online experience, etc., in the book, and there’s a section where the narrator reflects on the “real danger” which is “words that meant nothing, the way any word could be made to mean nothing, it was a way of erasing reality or placing reality beyond our grasp.” I guess this is another fiction question. Does fiction — not art generally but fiction specifically — play any role in helping words retain or even deepen their meaning?

Yeah, I absolutely think so. Social media and the kind of attention that social media trains us in is a radically flattening kind of attention. In our feeds there’s a tweet about genocide and then a tweet about Chappell Roan, and then a tweet about, I don’t know, chocolate… All of that is kind of leveled in terms of the claim it makes on our attention. I think art is radically different from that. Art involves a radical prioritization of objects of attention. Most importantly, art fixes our attention. Social media disperses it. You could substitute the word meaning for attention and the same things hold. Social media atomizes and disperses meaning, while art concentrates and fixes meaning. Art seems to me the opposite of social media. One argument this book makes is that art is the remedy for the way that social media, and our online lives more generally, are degrading of our humanness itself.

That’s very interesting because in the book you refer to both of them as a form of prosthetic consciousness. You directly refer to a poem as a prosthetic consciousness, but there’s also the idea of the “outsourced” consciousness of social media, and that is an interesting parallel. It’s sort of a convex versus concave lens you can put on.

That’s a great metaphor for it. You can have prostheses that deepen your relationship to the world and prostheses that further estrange you from the world. I hadn’t thought of those two moments in the book as echoing each other but you’re quite right that they do. The argument that poetry is an enrichment of our consciousness versus the argument that social media is in essence an evacuation of our consciousness. I guess the book does make that argument.

It could be that it’s intentional, or at least you can pretend it was.

Ha, absolutely.

I think those are the best parts of novels, honestly, when someone tells you what you did and you’re like, Oh, you’re right.

Absolutely.

Speaking of intentionalities — and this is another thing I covered in my essay, so sorry if this is repetitive — were the Sontag parallels intentional? Toward the end, as he leaves the hospital, your narrator says “I wanted to be on the other side again of that gulf that separates the sick from the well.” It echoes the opening to Illness As Metaphor: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Oh, that’s so good.

PN
Were you reading that at all while you were writing this?

I was not. But that moment is actually a very deliberate echo of the end of What Belongs to You when the narrator thinks in exactly the same terms about Mitko, and so I was thinking of What Belongs to You there. I don’t know that particular Sontag very well. But that’s a fascinating quote and a fascinating parallel.

Another great text about sickness, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, was sent to me by a friend shortly after I came out of the hospital. I had read that in undergrad at some point, but I deliberately did not reread it while I was working on this book because I didn’t want to be influenced. But when I read it after I finished the book, it was amazing how much resonates, how many parallels there are even though those parallels weren’t direct in some way.

It almost underscores just how truly — like you say, “the great banality” — how truly similar the experience is that a lot of people share while they’re seriously ill.

I think that’s true.

It sort of echoes or rhymes with the wordless total experience that sex can deliver a lot of the time. Just because it’s transcendent doesn’t mean it’s not banal.

That’s a beautiful statement. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

This is a little out of the blue but another thing I really love is that first passage when he notices the nurse’s name tag and it brings him back to listening to Kathleen Ferrier and how the voice “created” something for the narrator: “it didn’t just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn’t have felt before. It humanized me.” Which still riffs on the idea of the prosthetic, I guess. This sense of space or enlargement permeates the novel. I guess this is an enormous question, but what do you think that readers and listeners and viewers do with all this space?

That’s a very brilliant question. You know, it’s a question that I don’t know that I have an answer for, and also one I might be resistant to having an answer for. I don’t think this is the question you’re asking, but it feels like that kind of question could become a question about utility or validity.

One of my feelings about art or aesthetic experience or aesthetic making is that it is radically agnostic or apathetic regarding ends. In some sense the way that it calls us to presentness is a resistance to the logic of outcome and ends. I do think that art equips us in certain ways, or allows us to exercise certain faculties in ways that potentially have a kind of beneficent real-world outcome, but I think that the real value of art is mysterious and un-engineerable, and we can’t know what we will do with all of that space. That’s part of the gift of art. Unlike so many other aspects of our world, it doesn’t point us toward somewhere. It’s not directed in that way. Instead, it’s about immanence and presentness.

Less doing, more being.

Yeah, less doing, more being, and also the sense that it doesn’t overdetermine. It creates these spaces and maybe the spaces don’t have to do anything, and maybe there’s no way to know what we’ll do with this added spaciousness. I guess I’d say that. I am suspicious of any utilitarian claim made on the part of art, even though sometimes I make them. Art helps us live. But I think the way that it helps us live is radically mysterious, and resistant to formula.

A Conversation with garth greenwell

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